Michael Bloomberg, U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change, announced a $50 million commitment to partners worldwide to catalyze a global effort to move nations away from coal dependence, expanding his funding outside the United States.
It marks Bloomberg’s first investment in efforts outside the United States to decrease reliance on coal and shift to renewable, cleaner energy sources. European Climate Foundation will be the leading partner in Europe.
Bloomberg Philanthropies, in partnership with the ECF, will support the ongoing efforts of organizations across Europe to achieve cleaner air and a safer climate by reducing dependence on coal for power generation, to accelerate Europe’s transition to coal-free energy, and to secure a just transition and a brighter future for those communities and regions that are currently dependent on coal. The project will launch initially in Europe and expand into other countries later on.
The European Union as a whole still generates more than 21 percent of its power from coal, with Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom alone making up more than half of the coal power plant capacity in the EU. Despite the introduction of new emission limits, pollution from coal plants in the EU is estimated to lead to approximately 20,000 premature deaths each year and many tens of thousands of cases of respiratory illness.
The commitment follows Bloomberg’s recent $64 million commitment to the Beyond Coal campaign in the United States. In the U.S., Bloomberg’s efforts to move away from coal have spurred the closing of more than 50 percent of the United States’ coal plants since 2011.
