The European Union has allocated P3.76 billion in green financing as part of its commitment to support the Philippines’ sustainable economic activities.

“The EU, therefore, stands ready to continue its engagements with the Philippines on approaches to ensure environmentally sustainable economic activities,” said  Thomas Wiersing, Chargé d’affaires of the EU Delegation to the Philippine in a speech at the webinar on ”State of Play: Green Recovery and Sustainable Reporting” organized by the EU.

According to Wiersing, the P3.76 billion fund under EU’s Access to Sustainable Energy Programme “responds to the Philippines’ goal to increase energy access, promote renewable energy sources to decrease the use of polluting power sources and reduce the negative impact on the environment and health.”

The fund also supports the Philippines’s thrust in making energy efficiency and conservation a national way of life, he said.

Wiersing cited the Philippines for pursuing the implementation of an ambitious climate adaptation and mitigation pledge with EU support in line with its ratification of the Paris Agreement.

On top of the financing aspect, the top EU official of the EU Delegation to the Philippines is also collaborating with the Department of Science and Technology on the delivery of a national support project on remote sensing centered on the EU Copernicus Earth Observation program.

He said, EU has reconfirmed its commitment to a green, digital, and resilient recovery and will stick to its goal to be climate neutral by 2050.  “The European Green Deal provides an action plan to boost the efficient use of resources by moving to a clean, circular economy, restore biodiversity and reduce pollution,” he said.

Meanwhile, Finance Assistant Secretary Paula Alvarez, in a presentation at the same webinar, cited the  EU assistance and international cooperation with EU countries for green finance or sustainable financing towards more green and resilient projects especially at this time that the effects of the pandemic have negatively limited the government’s budget.

Alvarez said that due to the COVID 19 pandemic and the impending threat of climate change, the Philippines is also one of the most disaster-prone economies.

She noted that strong typhoons such as Yolanda, Sendong, Pablo cumulatively

claimed over 3,000 lives and affected 10 million people. “The economic damages caused by these typhoons and the losses amounted to approximately P256 billion,” she said adding this amount is projected to increase on a long-term basis because of climate change effects.

The Philippines is also located in the Pacific Ring of Fire. In addition, there will an estimated additional 8.3 million vulnerable Filipinos by 2022.

This means the government has to spend more money to keep these Filipinos relocate to much safer areas.

from the but-massive-lobbying-and-dirty-tricks-will-soon-fix-that dept

By Glyn Moody

The EU is now starting to work in earnest on what is likely to be its most important new law for the online world, the Digital Services Act (DSA). Techdirt wrote about this last year when the European Commission started sketching out (bad) ideas for the new law. The basic impetus for the DSA is to replace the EU’s e-Commerce Directive, which was passed 20 years ago and is clearly in need of an update. As the European Commission’s page on the DSA explains, there are two core elements:

First, the Commission would propose clear rules framing the responsibilities of digital services to address the risks faced by their users and to protect their rights. The legal obligations would ensure a modern system of cooperation for the supervision of platforms and guarantee effective enforcement.

Second, the Digital Services Act package would propose ex ante rules covering large online platforms acting as gatekeepers, which now set the rules of the game for their users and their competitors. The initiative should ensure that those platforms behave fairly and can be challenged by new entrants and existing competitors, so that consumers have the widest choice and the Single Market remains competitive and open to innovations.

Those aims mean that the DSA touches on several of the most contentious issues in the online world, such as the introduction of mandatory pan-European rules for tackling online hate speech and disinformation, and efforts to control platforms that are “gatekeepers” — basically US companies like Google and Facebook. In other words, the DSA is going to be important, and not just for the EU. One of the key players in the drafting of the DSA is the European Parliament. The good news is that in a series of votes MEPs have made clear that they want protection for key human rights to be an integral part of the new law.

The votes concerned reports from three of the Parliament’s specialist committees: those for the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, Legal Affairs, and Civil Liberties (pdf). The three reports are couched in a rather impenetrable EU-speak; fortunately, the European Parliament has put out a press release on the votes that provides a more comprehensible summary of the three reports. The European Parliament is quite open about what the EU hopes to achieve with the DSA: “With the upcoming package, the European Union aims to shape the digital economy at EU level as well as setting the standards for the rest of the world, as it did with data protection.” One of the priorities of the DSA is tackling illegal content online. On this, MEPs say:

A binding “notice-and-action” mechanism must be set up so that users can notify online intermediaries about potentially illegal online content or activities. This would help online intermediaries to react quickly and be more transparent regarding the actions they have taken on potentially illegal content. Users should be able to seek redress through a national dispute settlement body.

The European Parliament wants a distinction made between illegal content and harmful content, with a legal liability only for the former. MEPs say that there should be no general monitoring of users, and that platforms should not use upload filters for controlling harmful or illegal content: “The final decision on whether content is legal or not should instead be taken by an independent judiciary and not by private undertakings”. It’s hard to square that with the awful Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive, which inevitably requires precisely this kind of upload filter to block allegedly infringing content. MEPs say that harmful content should be dealt with through “enhanced transparency obligations and by helping citizens to acquire media and digital literacy regarding the dissemination of such content.” According to the European Parliament, another priority of the DSA should be enhancing consumer protection and user safety:

Platforms and online intermediation services will need to get better at detecting and taking down false claims and tackling rogue traders, e.g. those selling false medical equipment or dangerous products online, as happened during the COVID-19 outbreak.

MEPs also call for a new “Know Your Business Customer” principle to be introduced, requiring platforms to check and stop fraudulent companies using their services to sell their illegal and unsafe products and content.

More controversial is a call for rules to prevent — not merely remedy — what MEPs called “market failures by big platforms”. The stated aim is to open up markets to new entrants. Some of the most striking ideas to emerge from the reports are: to allow online users to opt out of content curation, to be informed if a service is enabled by AI, and to ban microtargeted advertising:

Targeted advertising must be regulated more strictly in favour of less intrusive, contextualised forms of advertising that require less data and do not depend on previous user interaction with content. MEPs also call on the Commission to further assess options for regulating targeted advertising, including a phase-out leading to a ban.

As Techdirt has noted, such targeted advertising doesn’t really seem to bring much in the way of benefit to advertisers, but certainly causes people to be tracked relentlessly, and huge amounts of personal information to be gathered. Getting rid of it in the EU could encourage companies to re-think their advertising strategies globally, just as the GDPR has had a big knock-on effect on data protection everywhere. That would be welcome, as would a move to enshrine in the DSA a right to use digital services anonymously “whenever possible”. Adding a right to strong encryption without backdoors would be even better: at the moment, one report simply “Stresses the importance to apply effective end-to-end encryption to data”.

Two of the reports approved by the European Parliament are what are known as “legislative initiatives” (PDF). Although not binding on the European Commission, such initiatives require a much fuller response if any of the proposed ideas are rejected. This gives the European Parliament’s ideas more chance of making it into the final text of the DSA. Against that, some of the most powerful companies in the world will be deeply affected by the EU’s new law, which guarantees years of fierce lobbying and dirty tricks, as the dispiriting experience of the Copyright Directive demonstrated.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

YEREVAN, OCTOBER 25, ARMENPRESS. The European Union considers unacceptable Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s remarks addressed to French President Emmanuel Macron where he said that the French President needs “mental treatment, EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell said on Twitter.

“The statements of the Turkish President addressed to the French President are unacceptable. We call on Turkey to stop that dangerous confrontation chain”, Borrell said.

He also stated that the conclusions of the European Council contain a real proposal for restoring the relations with Turkey, however, added that the political will of the Turkish authorities is needed for this positive agenda.

“Otherwise, Turkey will be further isolated”, he said.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan

        <div class="paywall" readability="49.688442211055">

On Saturday, France had said it was recalling its envoy to Turkey for consultations after Erdogan said Macron needed his mental health checked.

“The remarks by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan regarding President Emmanuel Macron are unacceptable,” Borrell tweeted.

“Call to Turkey to cease this dangerous spiral of confrontation.”

Erdogan accused Macron of having a “problem” with Islam and with Muslims for defending the right to show cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed — an act for which a French schoolteacher was murdered last week.

France and Turkey are at loggerheads over a range of issues including maritime rights in the eastern Mediterranean, Libya, Syria and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

And ties between Ankara and Brussels are similarly fraught, particularly with regard to Turkey’s oil and gas exploration activities in the eastern Mediterranean.

At a summit at the beginning of October, EU leaders adopted a carrot and stick approach, offering Ankara the prospect of closer ties and better trade if it commits to “pursuing dialogue in good faith and abstaining from unilateral actions”.

But it warned that the EU was prepared to use sanctions — possibly including broad-based economic measures — if Turkey persists with what Brussels sees as the illegal infringement of Cypriot waters.

“The conclusions of the European Council entail a real offer to relaunch our relationship, but political willingness is needed on the part of the Turkish authorities on this positive agenda,” Borrell tweeted on Sunday.

“Otherwise, Turkey will be even more isolated,” he added.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.