The UK’s action plan on sustainable use of pesticides aims to reduce the risks and impacts of pesticide use on the environment and encourage alternative approaches and techniques. How is the UK doing?
The Nature Directives (i.e. Birds Directive and Habitats Directive) are the key instruments of EU environmental policy; the Fitness Check support study, carried out by Milieu, IEEP and ICF for the European Commission DG-ENV, examined their effectiveness, efficiency, relevance, EU-added value and their coherence with the wider acquis.
Ensuring the carbon sustainability of bioenergy requires a new approach in EU policy. This IEEP report spells out a different pathway to the one proposed by the European Commission in the recently released “winter package”.
Ecological Focus Areas are intended to safeguard and improve biodiversity on arable farms in the EU. This IEEP study for EEB and BirdLife examined the evidence for potential biodiversity impacts on farmland, taking into account how the areas are being managed.
Understanding the consequences of increased biomass demand for energy on the environment is central to the development of future policy on renewable energy in Europe. This study seeks to help answer this need by modelling different levels of biomass demand for energy and the consequences for land use and forest based industries.
Protecting nature and biodiversity is helping to tackle urgent health and social challenges across Europe. A new IEEP study shows how urban, suburban and rural green areas bring multiple and often overlooked benefits to society.
Improving the resource efficient use of wood through cascading the resource from one use to another, requires action throughout the wood flow. Current efforts focus on recovering and re-using waste wood but more could be done with the production and utilisation of wood processing residues and improving the balancing between the material and energy use of wood.
Voluntary biodiversity offsetting was piloted in six English areas by local planning authorities and stakeholder organisations who agreed to take part in the government programme. IEEP and Collingwood Environmental Planning, together with David Tyldesley, assessed the UK government programme from 2012 to 2014.
The study reviews evidence of the impacts of UK's low carbon energy policy on biodiversity in the UK and abroad, and incorporates biodiversity effects of low carbon energy scenarios into the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change 2050 pathway calculator tool.
IEEP assessed threats to Gough and Inaccessible Island World Heritage Site on behalf of the RSPB. The report brings together evidence that globally important seabird colonies and endemic species are under threat of extinction from invasive alien species, especially predatory house mice, and that the proposed mouse eradication programme should proceed as quickly as possible.
They are more than just a nature conservation tool – a study by IEEP shows how EU Marine Protected Areas help to maintain and improve the provision of a wide range of ecosystem services and related socio-economic benefits.
Defining effective and workable sustainability criteria is one of the critical steps in decarbonising Europe’s energy sector. They must provide the necessary safeguards for the use of bioresources in Europe, as well as the policy and investment certainty required for sustainable deployment.
Wildlife crime threatens global biodiversity. The EU is both a destination and a transit region for illegally-traded products. A new study for the European Parliament summarises the situation in Europe and offers policy recommendations in view of the upcoming EU Action Plan. A set of in-depth case studies outline the situation in five EU countries.
What is the most cost-effective way to encourage basic environmental management across the farmed countryside in the EU-28? Learning from experience to date in greening Pillar 1 of the CAP, this report considers a range of options to increase the environmental added value from greening.
There is an important environmental dimension to any decision by the UK to leave the EU. This paper for the UK All-Party Parliamentary Environment Group (APPG) explores the options that might be pursued outside the EU and considers the potential impact on environmental and climate policy.
If the UK decides to leave the EU following the referendum in June, there would be significant consequences, not only for policy, law, and trade relations, but for the environment.
Promoting the cascading use of wood through policy is one approach to improve resource efficiency and increase the overall availability of wood for use in a variety of sectors.
Current data availability is inadequate to undertake a detailed national or European level study of land areas that are underutilised and could be considered available for bioenergy production within the EU.
