“We don't give credit, we don't wait for benefits.” This is life in Czech Karviná as it moves away from coal

Around 20 billion crowns is heading to massive projects intended to help improve life in coal regions. However, they mostly fail to address the social problems these regions face.

Several children run out of the building housing a low-threshold centre for children and young people in the Nové Město district of Karviná. They stop on the steps, seemingly unsure where to go. After a while, they run towards Builders' Square, the centre of a once showpiece mining housing estate built in the spirit of socialist realism in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, it is a socially excluded area where social problems are concentrated and which does not have a particularly good reputation in Karviná.

The grand-looking apartment blocks are a symbol of an era that was meant to bring economic prosperity to what was then Czechoslovakia. But half of the shopfronts lining the square are now empty. Local residents have access to a pawn shop, a gambling venue, a pub or a small grocery store where they buy food. A sign on its door eloquently sums up the difficulties faced by local people: “We don't give credit, we don't wait for benefits.”

Karviná, a city of 50,000, has long had the highest unemployment rate in the country. This August, it stood at 8.2 percent, while the national average was just under four percent. Although unemployment was even higher in the past and many former miners found jobs in industrial zones, young and educated people are leaving the city and the region has long faced population decline.

“The main reason is the decline in mining. Few people realise that Karviná started out as a city of 30,000 people and, thanks to coal mining, grew to as many as 80,000 inhabitants. As mining declines, the population naturally falls. State or European Union incentives, as is common practice in Western European countries, could help prevent further outflow. This could stop or at least mitigate the trend,” says Karviná spokesperson Lukáš Hudeček.

Although, according to him, there are cases of people returning to Karviná after years away, around a third of its residents have left the city over the past 30 years. The last site in Karviná where hard coal is mined is the ČSM mine, where extraction will continue until the end of 2025.

Due to a lack of interest in housing in Karviná's “problem” district, an estimated thousand flats have disappeared from the area over the past ten years, according to Karvinský deník. Their owner, Swedish company Heimstaden, has often had vacated buildings demolished. It owns more than 40,000 former OKD flats, mainly in the Karviná and Ostrava areas, and is the country's largest rental housing operator.

Similar regions, similar problems

Pirate Party representative in the Moravian-Silesian Region and Karviná native Zuzana Klusová has a good overview of developments in the socially excluded Karviná area. She works mainly with Roma children at a low-threshold centre for children and young people. Many of them face violence, are neglected and some often do not even have a paediatrician. “Those children have experienced all sorts of things, you don't even want to know,” she says.

Klusová is among the critics of the strategic projects heading to her region. She points out that these are megalomaniacal projects that overlook social issues. “These projects are like putting a cherry on top of a cake that is mouldy underneath. The social aspect has been left out entirely,” she believes.

Zuzana Vondrová also believes that money from the Just Transition Fund should be directed towards social issues. For the past five years, she has worked on the transformation of coal regions at the non-governmental non-profit organisation Centre for Transport and Energy, covering the Ústí nad Labem, Moravian-Silesian and Karlovy Vary regions.

“All three regions have very similar problems in terms of the highest level of education attained. Many people have only primary education, they have socially excluded areas, and they deal with debt traps and energy poverty. There is certainly room for this in the Just Transition Fund, and I see great potential in education, for example,” Vondrová says.

Hydrogen on one side, university students on the other

Projects to transform post-coal regions are divided in each region into strategic, umbrella and thematic projects according to their importance and investment level. The first group is intended to have a significant impact on the entire region and help local companies and entrepreneurs find new ways to earn money from something other than fossil fuels. These are larger-scale plans, often previously selected by the government together with the region. In each of the three regions, they account for roughly half of the funds allocated to the region, with each region planning around ten projects of this scale.

Two projects are under consideration in Karviná. The first is PDI's Podolupark Karviná. It is to involve building a plasma waste gasification and hydrogen production centre, as well as a photovoltaic park. It is also to include a residential zone. The project has a budget of 7.6 billion crowns, with subsidies expected to cover 1.3 billion of the amount.

EDEN Karviná – a research and education park – is also among the more budget-intensive projects, seeking to draw 2.5 billion crowns in subsidies. The core of the project is to be an “eco-campus” of the Silesian University, combined with the construction of large-capacity greenhouses for research purposes and environmental education.

A greenhouse as an attraction

The city has high expectations for the project. It believes it should bring new teachers and students to Karviná. It also expects the project to create jobs for hundreds of people, whether directly on the site or in related services. The greenhouse is expected to attract 350,000 to 500,000 visitors a year.

“That would also mean increased demand for various services in the city and its surroundings – restaurants, accommodation facilities and others,” says spokesperson Hudeček, adding that they have registered interest from an investor in building a new hotel facility. “We are convinced that once the project is officially approved and the subsidy awarded, investor interest will intensify and the process of further individual investments will begin,” he says.

However, Klusová is not sure whether that will be enough. The issue is ensuring that students not only come to the city, but also stay there. “Will that happen simply because people come there to study? Will they stay when they have a ghetto next door?” she asks.

Republished from EkoNews.cz, a website covering business and sustainability.