IEEP has published a new report that presents success stories relating to habitats and species that are the focus of the EU nature directives and provides key lessons on effective approaches that can be shared to achieve better overall results. The study focuses on supporting EU action through better knowledge and evidence, and provides an important contribution to the current discussions on the EU and global biodiversity policy regime for the post-2020 era.
IEEP has published a new report that presents success stories relating to habitats and species that are the focus of the EU nature directives and provides key lessons on effective approaches that can be shared to achieve better overall results. The study focuses on supporting EU action through better knowledge and evidence, and provides an important contribution to the current discussions on the EU and global biodiversity policy regime for the post-2020 era.
Leading up to IEEP's Think 2030 conference, experts express their views on Europe's most pressing sustainability issues in the Think 2030 blog series, Pathways to 2030.
The eighth edition of Pathways to 2030 features Gustavo Becerra, Erik Gerritsen and Marianne Kettunen, policy analysts for IEEP, who discuss lessons learnt from the EU current biodiversity policy framework and its challenges for the next decade.
Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an important policy tool for protecting vulnerable marine and coastal species and habitats.
By supporting the resilience of ecosystems, MPAs may also maintain and generate goods and services that can benefit different sectors in the “blue” European economy. However, MPAs are often seen as primarily imposing restrictions and costs on economic activities, creating aversion toward their establishment and protection.
In environmental terms there are at least two ways of looking at the prospects for 2018. Viewed through the rather sober lens of EU process, it has the look of a project completion and tidying up period with limited long term impetus to the last full year of the current European Parliament and Commission.
European countries have developed a wide range of policies to encourage climate mitigation through land use “sinks”; but as the land use sector is brought fully into the EU’s climate targets, policies will need to be more ambitious, and more focused on results.
A new evaluation of the Common Agriculture Policy’s Pillar 1 greening measures for the European Commission, led by IEEP on behalf of Alliance Environnement, found that overall the greening measures have led to only small changes in management practices, except in a few specific areas.
On Wednesday 15th of November the European Parliament is expected to adopt a resolution on an EU Action Plan for nature, people and the economy. The Action Plan, intended to boost the implementation of the EU’s Birds and Habitats Directives, was presented by the European Commission in April this year following an in-depth fitness check.
How do we harness the emotional power of language better to reduce our destructive impact on the natural world? Can we stop speaking like eurocrats and start speaking like people?
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.
The UK’s referendum result has implications for environmental outcomes in the UK and across Europe: IEEP will be working to ensure the risks are understood and managed.
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.
Renewable energy is key to the decarbonisation of Europe’s energy supply, however, the scale of expansion needed will have significant impacts over a considerable area. This new report suggests how a resource efficient energy system might be delivered in a way that minimises and mitigates impacts on biodiversity and the wider environment.
As part of the fitness check of the EU Nature Directives, the European Commission is organising a high-level conference in Brussels on 20 November. The purpose of the conference is to present and discuss the emerging findings from the assessment of evidence and information gathered during the process.
A significant injection of money was agreed for ‘green’ farming practices under the recent CAP reform. This report examines the environmental impact these measures are likely to have on the ground and concludes that Member States’ implementation choices appear to have much diminished the chances of the greening measures delivering significant additional environmental benefits.
The core objective of both nature directives is to achieve a favourable conservation status of European protected habitats and species. An understanding of how these criteria for conservation status have been interpreted and implemented across the Member States is important as greater uniformity in the interpretation could improve the quality of biodiversity reporting at the European level.
