More than three thousand people in Bosnia and Herzegovina die every year due to diseases or consequences caused by polluted air, according to the WHO data presented by Human Rights Watch experts in the latest report. Bosnia and Herzegovina has great potential to reduce this number and to move towards renewable energies, but the authorities are not doing enough, says senior researcher for the environment and human rights HRW Felix Horne.

N1: Your report is very important, but also very timely for Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially for Sarajevo, because even today, early in the season, we have fog in Sarajevo and we already feel that this will be a bad year when it comes to air quality. In your report, you refer to WHO data, which states that around 3,300 people die due to exposure to air pollution, which is around 9% of all deaths in Bosnia and Herzegovina. How bad is this figure when put into reality and compared to other cities or other regions in the world?

HORNE: I mean, it's one of the worst, I mean, Bosnia has the fifth highest death rate in the world from air pollution. And obviously, as you know very well, the air pollution season is quite concentrated in the winter months. When you look at some sort of map of the most polluted cities in the world, you often have cities in Asia and Southeast Asia, you know, occasionally in parts of the Middle East, Western Balkan countries are somewhat beyond what we see during those winter months, you have the most polluted air in the world. The first day I did this research, when I landed in Sarajevo, it was the most polluted city in the world.

N1: Also, your report says that air pollution is basically enhanced by coal, wood, and other plant materials, which are used for heating here in Sarajevo, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. But we should not forget any polluter even bigger than that. And these are coal-fired power plants, which we have in the entire region of the Western Balkans because if I'm not mistaken, six or seven of them in the entire region are worse than all the rest in the European Union.

HORNE: No, that's right. And those coal-fired power plants are very outdated. They're using old technologies and even some of the new technologies that could reduce emissions, which wouldn't completely reduce emissions but would reduce emissions, that are used to some extent in many of those plants. And as you, as your viewers well know, there has been a lot of discussion about the future expansion of the coal fleet in Bosnia. And that's very worrying at a time when obviously the world can't afford new fossil fuel projects due to climate change, but coal is also a significant contributor to air pollution. There are some things in Bosnia that are difficult to control in terms of air pollution, including the fact that many cities are located in this narrow river valley. So in winter, you get that inversion effect that keeps pollutants trapped, but there are some things that make Bosnia different. Governments can actually do something to deal with it. And one of them is moving away from coal-based electricity production and moving towards the significant potential of renewable energy Bosnia has.