The EU Water Framework Directive and ist Groundwater Daughter Directive call for a cost-effective protection of all water resources. For groundwater, the assessment of cost-effective protection measures is complicated by the long time lags and the flow dynamics within aquifers. Together with the water supply company OOWV and the Lower Saxony Board of Agriculture, Ecologic has analysed the cost-effectiveness of groundwater protection measures in a drinking water protection area, and thereby developed a practical solution for dealing with the specific problems of cost-effectiveness analyses related to groundwater.

The Washington Post called Lester Brown "one of the world's most influential thinkers." The Telegraph of Calcutta refers to him as "the guru of the environmental movement." While visiting Germany in order to launch the German edition of his book "Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble", he gave a talk in Berlin on 22 January 2007.

The heads of state of the eight major industrialised nations recently reinforced that the United Nations will remain “the appropriate forum for negotiating future global action on climate change.” Within the U.N., however, a number of concurrent “tracks” have emerged for negotiations and discussions, accompanied by a certain degree of overlap, and giving rise to questions on the mandate, scope and limitations of each track as a pathway to a future climate regime. Options for global climate governance beyond 2012 have been addressed in formal negotiations based on Article 3 (9) and 9 of the Kyoto Protocol, while parties to the UNFCCC have initiated an open and non-binding dialogue on future co-operative action under the Convention. In this article Dr. Camilla Bausch and Michael Mehling provide an overview of these developments.

The three-part seminar series "What Price Energy Transformation" dealt with the energy and security policy challenges evoked by climate change. The participants from Europe and the USA discussed their views and knowledge on the causes, impacts and solutions of the changes with the aim of developing a common paper providing concrete recommendations and instructions for policy-makers.

Ecologic is part of the European Environment Agency's European Topic Center (ETC) on Water. The ETC is supporting the Agency in all water related issues such as databases, indicators and policy recommendations for the period 2007 to 2010. Within the team of 11 partners, Ecologic is responsible for climate, assessments, economics and WISE-related tasks.

Bowyer, Catherine; Peter Hjerp; Alexander Neubauer 2006: The Proposed Directive on Waste. An assessment of the Impact Assessment and the Implications of the Integration of the Hazardous Waste Directive into the existing Waste Framework Directive. Brussels.

Bakkes, J.A.; I. Bräuer; P. ten Brink et. al. 2006: Cost of Policy Inaction. Scoping study for DG Environment.

While trade sustainability impact assessments (trade SIAs) have generated much useful information about the potential impacts of trade liberalisation, they have made very limited impact on trade negotiations, which generate unresolved controversy, if not deadlock. This paper contends that one reason for this is that trade SIAs do not explicitly recognise the motives for countries to resist free trade.

The Yearbook Ecology 2007 has been published at the end of September 2006. Ecologic is one of the institutes supporting this yearbook. This year's focus is on resource productivity, stakeholder dialogues as well as on energy policy.

The European Emissions Trading System is a central pillar of German climate policy. After its introduction in 2005, some weak points, however, became obvious so that great hopes were pinned on the National Allocation Plan for the second trading period (NAP II). In their article for DowJones TradeNews Emissions, Helen Lückge and Camilla Bausch discuss if the German NAP II fulfills its economic objectives.