499 results found for "climate change" ordered by most recent first
Now that COP27 has come to a bitter end, the world’s attention has turned to Qatar for this year’s next big climate event. With the last eight years on track to be the warmest on record, we dig into the carbon footprint of this year’s FIFA World Cup and what the lack of accountability around it means for global efforts to fight climate change.
After experiencing the worst summer drought in 500 years and an unusually warm October, EU policymakers should be determined to make the Green Deal a success. The only way to make this happen is to tackle – once and for all – our food system, which is economically, socially and environmentally unsustainable, from the sowing of the plants we eat or feed, to the animals we farm, to our consumption patterns.
The proposed EU regulation for nature restoration offers a unique opportunity to tackle both biodiversity loss and climate change through an integrated approach. Restoring ecosystems is essential to safeguard their carbon storage and enhance their sequestration capacities as well as increasing resilience and adaptability to the impacts of climate change. This policy brief highlights the key contributions that the proposed regulation can make to mitigating and adapting to climate change.
The UN Climate Change Champion for COP27, Dr Mohieldin, is right to make agriculture and food system transition the focus of the COP in Egypt this week. So far, the role of industrial agriculture systems in driving global warming has been ominously absent from international climate fora. Yet the issue of reducing industrial meat production – critical for achieving Paris goals – is the big cow in the room at COP27.
The EU has been pursuing a transition to a circular economy in earnest since the launch of the first EU Circular Economy Action Plan in 2015. In March 2020 the European Commission adopted a new Circular Economy Action Plan. Although a number of circular economy initiatives have been put forward, further steps are still needed to achieve a full circular economy transition in the EU.
While world leaders are currently preparing themselves for yet another UN Climate Change Conference – COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, the Institute for European Environmental Policy calls for decision-makers to address the need for a paradigm shift in economic, social, and environmental policies.
In the last 30 years, the amounts of CO2 emissions have increased at a rate faster than ever before in history. IEEP has calculated that they would need to be reduced twice as fast in order to stay well below a 2°C increase.
The time for the EU to act and minimise its share of global deforestation is now. The Deforestation-free Supply Chains Regulation is vital to begin addressing the global spillovers of the EU’s unsustainable consumption patterns, and to achieve the SDGs. This briefing analyses the potential impact of the EU Deforestation-free supply chains Regulation on smallholder farms.
Today, wildlife-rich habitats and key species group numbers are in decline, prompting governments to produce legislation to protect them and reverse downward trends. In order to do so, the EU has proposed targets for biodiversity and nature conservation, as well as the UK, and its four constituent nations. However, the extent and scope of these protections need to be properly assessed to ensure that targets are to be met in the future.
In her plans for 2023 addressed to the EU Parliament, President of the EU Commission von der Leyen did not mention the proposal for a Sustainable Food System legislative framework (SFSF). This created speculation about the timeframe of this key proposal which has been put forward as a cornerstone of the EU Green Deal for the agri-food sector. This blogpost, co-signed by members of the Think Sustainable Europe network, underlines the importance of the SFSF to be proposed next year in order to drive a sustainable transition of the EU food system, given the urgency of such a transition.
The consumption of plastic products in the EU creates significant environmental and social impacts along the whole value chain. Whilst the EU has in place a range of policies and legislation relevant to plastics, this briefing outlines some additional recommendations to address the potential negative spillovers from the pursuit of greater plastics circularity.
The European Commission proposed a zero-emission road mobility target for 2035 to reduce emissions produced by new passenger cars by 100% compared to 2021. Electric vehicles (EVs) are set to play a key role in decarbonising EU road transport, however, the net-zero transition will have implications for the EU's material demand and waste generation.
This new report reveals the scepticism of sustainability experts regarding the implementation status of the European Green Deal in the short term, but some cautious optimism post-2024. Based on insights from over 300 experts, the Green Deal Barometer provides recommendations for taking forward the implementation in the current crisis.
The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence proposal has the potential to transform the way business is conducted in Europe. Consideration of climate change-related adverse human rights and environmental impacts should be central to due diligence frameworks in general and to the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence (CSDD) proposal in particular.
For many foreign observers, and not a few UK citizens, the peculiarity of the British political system, where approximately 0.3% of the population gets to elect the leader of the political party in power (and thus indirectly elect the new Prime Minister) has been a source of puzzlement. Not surprisingly, the rights and wrongs of this have absorbed copious newspaper columns and articles and the debate feels far from settled.
IEEP is a partner in the new SHARED GREEN DEAL project that will use innovative social experiments to support the objectives of the European Green Deal, involving local communities across Europe. The project has received five million euros from the European Union's Innovation Programme Horizon 2020.
The EU is moving ahead on its ambition to develop and implement a European circular economy, as ambitioned by the new Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP) and its subsequent proposals. However, this objective is inherently intertwined with the rest of the global trading system, in addition to continuous geopolitical developments which risk complicating an already complex transition.
When Ursula von der Leyen presented one of the most ambitious political projects to date in EU history, aiming at making Europe the first climate-neutral continent, nobody could imagine that just a few months later, an unprecedented pandemic would lock down the whole EU. Yet, and despite strong pushes to derail the European Green Deal agenda as an immediate reply to the crisis, the Green Deal stayed afloat and was even slightly boosted through the national recovery and resilient plans.
The long-awaited proposal for an EU nature restoration regulation was finally presented on 22 June by the European Commission, highlighting an ambitious legislative framework to restore degraded ecosystems in the EU.