ZAGREB, 26 July 2021 - EU finance ministers on Monday confirmed the positive assessments of national recovery and resilience plans for another four member states, including Croatia, and initiated written procedure for their approval.

Excellent news for four more member states – Croatia, Cyprus, Lithuania and Slovenia. We have confirmed the positive assessments of the national plans of these four countries, Slovenian Finance Minister Andrej Šircelj said after an informal meeting of the Finance and Economic Council.

Since no decisions can be made at informal video meetings, written procedure was launched after the meeting to formally approve the national recovery and resilience plans of Croatia, Cyprus, Lithuania and Slovenia. The procedure is expected to be completed within the next few days.

On 8 July, the Commission gave the green light to Croatia's national recovery and resilience plan, worth €6.3 billion, and forwarded it to the Council for adoption.

Croatia has been allocated €6.3 billion in grants and 3.6 billion in favourable loans under the Recovery and Resilience Facility, the central element of the Next Generation EU recovery plan. It has been decided that Croatia will for now use only grants and that it may ask for loans at a later date. The €6.3 billion amounts to 11.6 percent of Croatia's 2019 GDP.

After the decision on approval of the recovery plan becomes official, Croatia will sign a financing agreement with the Commission and within two months of its signing it will receive an advance of 13 percent of the allocation, or €819 million. It is not yet known whether this amount will be disbursed in one or more tranches.

About ten days ago, EU finance ministers approved the initial batch of 12 national recovery and resilience plans (for Portugal, Spain, Greece, Denmark, Luxembourg, Austria, Slovakia, Latvia, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and France), which means that a total of 16 national plans will have been approved before the summer recess in August.

For more about politics in Croatia, follow TCN's dedicated page.

May 26, 2021 - With Energy Institute Hrvoje Požar (EIHP) being the lead partner, the REPLACE Project from Horizon Europe steadily continues the progress of renewable energy for the Kvarner region.

Earlier in January, TCN wrote about Croatian energy development, whose goal is to be based on clean technologies. And that it's not all empty talk, as shown by the third meeting of a local workgroup enrolled in the REPLACE Project. As Energy Institute Hrvoje Požar (EIHP) reports on its website, the REPLACE Project has a goal of supporting European energetic, climate, environmental, economic, and social goals with the deadline until 2030 and 2050.

As part of the OBZOR 2020 (Horizon Europe) EU program for research and innovations in the 2014-2020 time frame, the REPLACE Project receives EU funding. Twelve partners from nine countries participate in the project, and EIHP is in charge of the project activities in Primorska-Goranska county. In support of European goals, the plan of REPLACE Project is to gradually switch the current ineffective and outdated heating and cooling systems with new efficient systems which rely on renewable energy.

The meeting held at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Rijeka saw Dražen Balić, Antonia Tomas Stanković, and Lea Leopoldović from EIHP hold lectures presenting results of the first period of the project, but also the plans for future activities. The accent was put on implementing campaigns and collective actions supported by the members of the local workgroup. Energetic poverty, gender aspects, and „lock-in effect“ (an economic practice, where a company makes it extremely hard for their customers to leave them, even if the customer wants to) are the obstacles the project runners are aware of and were explained in greater detail. Another thing that stood out in the presentation was the presentation „Technology of Blue Energy in Croatia“, which presented modern technologies used in heating and cooling in coastal areas, and applicable to the Primorska -Goranska county.

Key institutions in the regions such as REA Kvarner (regional energy agency), Energo Rijeka (gas and heat energy provider), representatives of the Primorska-Goranska county, OIE Hrvatska (The economic-interest association The Renewable Energy Sources of Croatia - RES), and Rijeka Consumer Centre were present at the meeting, showing that the motivation to bring energy efficiency in Primorska-Goranska County is in its full strength. Both on corporal, political, and expert levels. 

Learn more about Rijeka on our TC page.

For more about science in Croatia, follow TCN's dedicated page.

May 13, 2021 - With Croatian scientists' reputation on the rise on the world stage, dr. Vernessa Smolčić is now the Croatian European Research Council (ERC) Fund Receiver. 

Croatian scientists continue to impact the European science scene. As the Faculty of Science (PMF) at the University of Zagreb reports on its website, their scientist and professor, dr. Vernesa Smolčić is one of the 10,000 receivers of non-returnable funds by the European Research Council (ERC). As PMF states, the excellence of research work is the only criteria to get these funds.

„Scientists compete in a very strong international competition in which the European Commission from the total number of applications picks up only 8-15% of the best. Projects founded by the ERC are the best researches in all of Europe, and working on ERC projects increase international recognition of the research, and cooperation with the elite global universities“, says PMF.

An online ceremony saw representatives of ERC welcoming all 10,000 receivers with particularly pointing out the top 15 who contributed to the transformation of science and research.

One of them was, you guessed it, dr. Vernessa Smolčić.

„Vernesa Smolčić studied physics at the University of Zagreb, where she is now a full professor at the Department of Physics in the Faculty of Science. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, followed by a postdoctoral position at Caltech in California, USA. In 2009, she obtained an independent ESO ALMA COFUND Fellowship from the European Southern Observatory. In 2013, she won one of the first ERC Starting Grants in Croatia“, says the ERC website.

screenshot / Astroučionica

The website also offers more details on how Smolčić (and other scientists, for that matter) made an incredible contribution in expanding human knowledge.

As Smolčić explained for the ERC website, there were more than a few unknowns in the astrophysics field due, primarily to instrumental limitations at the time. But, in 2014, „Smolčić’s team was one of the first to use new and upgraded radio telescopes in Chile, USA, Australia, and India. These telescopes offered a higher level of accuracy for tracing star formations and detecting galaxies, stretching back to when the universe was very young“, writes ERC.

„While the observation phase was very time consuming, Smolčić was immediately taken aback by the extent of the data. She was not only probing new areas of Space, but she was observing radio wavelengths that no other scientist had been able to see through a telescope lens in such detail, or for so many galaxies. Three years down the line, her team had over 850 hours of data. They analyzed and assembled datasets (radio sky mosaics, data collections) on various types of galaxies, their sources, and physical properties. These datasets were made publicly available to the broader astronomy community, to be used by other scientists to explore more of the universe’s unknowns“, concludes ERC.

„ERC funding really allowed me to conduct my research at the highest competitive levels“, said Smolčić. And you can learn more about her work in this interesting podcast.

European Research Council was established in 2007. As they say themselves, their mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields, based on scientific excellence.

„The ERC complements other funding activities in Europe such as those of the national research funding agencies, and is a flagship component of Horizon Europe, the European Union's Research Framework Programme for 2021 to 2027“, they said.

Learn more about Croatian inventions & discoveries: from Tesla to Rimac on our TC page.

For more about science in Croatia, follow TCN's dedicated page.

Over the next year, much-talked-about works on the Hrvatski Leskovac - Karlovac lowland railway section are finally set to begin, with a little help from Croatian access to EU funding.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Darko Bicak writes on the 12th of September, 2019, the reconstruction project for the existing track, and the construction of a second track of the Rijeka - Zagreb railway line on the 40.02 km Hrvatski Leskovac-Karlovac section, which is highly significant for the implementation of the Croatian lowland railway project, is eligible for co-financing from European Union (EU) funds, the Ministry of the Maritime Affairs, Transport and Infrastructure reported yesterday.

The competent ministry explained that JASPERS experts have now submitted a positive opinion to the Croatian Ministry of Regional Development and European Union (EU) Funds, a so-called IQR, for the proposal to co-finance the aforementioned project, with a total value of 3.5 billion kuna (with VAT included).

The ministry has since clarified that they do expect an official decision by the European Commission (EC) to give them the green light and ultimately approve the financing of the project within the next three months, and that the contract attesting to that will be signed by the end of this year.

The total eligible costs for co-financing are 2.7 billion kuna (excluding VAT), 85 percent of which will be co-financed through the Operational Program for Competitiveness and Cohesion, and the rest will come from the Croatian state budget.

The lowland railway will affect the overall competitiveness of the Port of Rijeka in the Northern part of the Adriatic by improving its connectivity with markets across Central Europe, such as those of Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, the ministry stated.

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