“Bulgaria continues its efforts with all partners for overcoming climate change, and for the implementation, in full, of the Paris Agreement. Any further enhancement of the ambition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions does not accord with our national interests,” said President Rumen Radev in Katowice, Poland, addressing the participants in the UN Climate Change Conference taking place there.

He pointed out that the social factor should also be taken into account – preserving thousands of jobs, and that mechanisms should be developed to boost the competitiveness of industry. Bulgaria is on track to overachieve the gas emissions reduction target by 20 percent by 2020, compared to 1990. In 2016 they were reduced by 49 percent compared to the baseline year of 1988, and by 4.4 percent compared to 2015, Rumen Radev said. 

“When we talk of clean-energy we must not forget that it is important to have reliable and predictable energy. In this respect Europe can help us a great deal if it does not impede, as it has done before, Russian gas supplies to Bulgaria, but also to the EU itself,” Rumen Radev added. Bulgaria’s head of state went back to the proposal he made to President Vladimir Putin during his visit in May this year – that the natural gas supplies to Bulgaria and the EU take place via the so-called “Bulgarian Stream”. “That is the only way Bulgaria will be able to be a truly independent energy distribution centre,” the Bulgarian President said.