Direct environmental investments focused primarily on water management projects, including the construction of sewage systems and wastewater treatment facilities. In the future, major spending can be expected on waste management-related projects. Accurate data on environmental spending are currently not available.
The environmental business sector in Croatia is small and young. It is estimated that fewer than 200 businesses provide environmental services and technologies (141 were included in this survey), and 56 percent of the companies were established after 1990. More than 80 percent of the companies were privately owned. The rest are in the process of privatization, fully state-owned or under some combination of state and private ownership.
With 14 percent of environmental companies operating joint-ventures with foreign firms, Croatia has the highest occurrence of foreign partnerships of all the surveyed countries. Partners for Croatian joint-ventures come mainly from Germany, the United States and Austria.
Total annual revenues from environmental activities reported by the 118 companies that provided financial data exceeded USD 99 million in 1995. Technical services generated more than half of the revenues, followed by the sale of environmental technologies (30 percent) and testing and monitoring activities (14 percent). Other income was generated from research, training and education, which accounted for 5 percent of total revenues.
When the total revenue was broken down by media, the largest share was generated from waste-related activities (40 percent), followed by water and wastewater activities (29 percent) and air pollution control and energy-related activities (7 percent each). The remaining revenues came from non-media specific activities, including industrial safety and noise, environmental impact assessment and soil and land activities.
As in the other surveyed countries, no effective formal channels exist to provide information on project opportunities in Croatia. Personal and professional contacts, fairs and trade shows, environmental publications, the State Directorate for Environmental Protection, the daily press and local authorities are among the primary sources for information about business opportunities. Professional associations, such as the chamber of commerce and the Academy of Sciences, are not seen as major information sources or as effective lobbying groups for the environmental business sector.
Croatia's environmental professionals showed high interest in information about ways to find domestic partners, domestic environmental regulations, domestic environmental problems, sources of project financing, new environmental technologies and EU environmental regulations.
Respondents showed high interest in several information delivery options, including a regular newsletter containing updated information on project opportunities, technologies and financing; conferences arranged to address specific environmental problems; and a local business coordinator to arrange meetings, contacts and workshops. More than half of the respondents would be willing to pay for such information products. Other delivery options in high demand included a partnering workshop designed to introduce Croatian business professionals to Western partners, government environmental officials and NGOs; and an environmental business directory.
Professional environmental training was requested particularly on environmental regulation and policy, environmental systems and their sustainability, environmental impact assessment and financing environmental investments.
The most important source for support and assistance for environmental projects was business and industrial associations, considered important by 64 percent of the survey respondents. Other important sources of assistance mentioned by more than half the respondents were financial institutions and the government.
Access to credit and financing was widely seen as the biggest barrier to the development of Croatia's environmental business sector and was mentioned by 77 percent of respondents. Other obstacles mentioned by more than half the respondents were tax regulations, market demand for environmental products and services and general access to information.