Christiane Gerstetter, Fellow Ecologic Legal, provided an introduction to various international agreements to a Palestinian audience during a workshop in Ramallah on 29-30 March 2010. The workshop was convened by the Environmental Quality Authority of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). Its aim was to raise awareness among Palestinians about international environmental agreements.Read more
During the summer semester 2010, the Research Group Ecosystem Services will organise a course on “Ecosystem Services and Land Use” at the Humboldt University Berlin. The course is geared toward Bachelor’s and Master’s students in geography or related disciplines. In this context, Holger Gerdes, Fellow at Ecologic Institute, will teach a class on the valuation of ecosystem services.
Further information on the project is available on the CORDIS Website.
Illegal fishing and logging, and the international trade in illegally sourced fish and wood products cause enormous environmental and economic damage. Consumer countries contribute to the problem by importing fish and timber without ensuring legality – a problem the EU tries to address with two new regulations. In this briefing paper, Duncan Brack, Heike Baumüller and Katharina Umpfenbach compare the recently adoptedRead more
The United Nations declared 2010 to be the International Year of Biodiversity. The European Commission is currently discussing a new target to halt the loss of biodiversity in Europe and the rest of the world. The Ecologic Institute is well positioned to contribute with a wide range of projects to developing meaningful steps towards a more effective policy for conserving biodiversity and ecosystems.
Ecologic Institute is one of the co-authors of a study on the costs and benefits of the Natura 2000 network. This study assisted the European Commission in obtaining an accurate estimate of the costs of managing the network, increasing awareness of its socio-economic benefits, and developing a methodology for the systematic updating and refinement of the costs and benefits linked to the network. The study is available for download.Read more
After having missed their target for halting biodiversity loss by 2010, EU policy makers must now rethink their policy actions for protecting biodiversity and ecosystem services as well as the financial resources involved in their implementation. The aim of the project is to produce an estimate of the total economic costs of EU biodiversity policy.Read more
What is the state of sustainable development in the European Union? The 2009 Eurostat monitoring report reviews the progress and implementation of the EU Sustainable Development Strategy.
The 2009 monitoring report was published on the Eurostat website. As partner in a consortium with the Vienna University of Economic and Business (RIMAS), INFRAS, and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), the Ecologic Institute played aRead more
In the context of this study, a literature review is carried out in order to assess the status of research on the economic value of soil. Based on this analysis, the potential for an all-encompassing assessment of the economic value of soil on the national level will be determined.Read more
Deforestation is responsible for roughly one fifth of global carbon emissions, most of it in the tropical forests of the developing world. At the Copenhagen climate talks, negotiators discussed a potential new mechanism to compensate nations for keeping their forests intact. The article by Duncan Brack and Katharina Umpfenbach looks at these REDD proposals (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), arguing that carbon finance alone might not be enough to stop deforestation – unless part of it is spent upfront on improving forest governance.Read more