The impact of climate change on Europe's water resources is a critical issue for people's lives and the economy. Even if emissions of greenhouse gases were stabilised today, increases in temperature and the associated impacts, including water availability and flooding, will continue for many decades to come. This report, which was published by the European Environment Agency (EEA) in February 2007 and co-authored by Ecologic, shows that there is a need to adapt to climate change for water resource policy and regulation across Europe. The report assesses the strengths and weaknesses of current policies and regulations, and describes progress and activities in European countries.

What is the role of civil society actors in the assessment of trade agreements with regard to their sustainability impact? The book chapter authored by Markus Knigge and Nicole Kranz analyses the underlying processes and contexts and makes suggestions for the effective involvement of stakeholders in the assessment process at the EU level.

Martinez G., Shordt, K., Reducing corruption in the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector. Contribution of Netherlands' development assistance to risk assessment and mitigation of corruption in the WASH sector. Final report, 08 February 2007 (unpublished). At request at the Directorate-General for International Cooperation of the Netherlands (DGIS).

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.

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.

While Germany has introduced a comprehensive ecological tax reform (ETR) in 1999, Poland has taken only first steps into this direction. In order to intensify the exchange between German and Polish experts from politics, research and NGOs, the Polish Ministry of the Environment together with the German Ministry of the Environment organised a workshop in Warsaw during which the design of the German ecological tax reform and its implications were discussed. Helen Lückge, Fellow at Ecologic, presented the economic implications of the German ETR.

The second transnational conference of the WaterCost project as part of the Intereg North Sea Region focused on the issue of cost-effectiveness analysis and how it to apply it to groundwater and water supply issues. Benjamin Görlach gave a presentation on the role of cost- benefit considerations in the implementation process of the Water Framework Directive. He concluded that since there is only patchy data on costs and benefits, and elaborated on the role of the AquaMoney project in addressing this gap.

Between 1990 and 2000 alone, more than 800,000 hectares were built on in Europe. This phenomenon is due to changing lifestyles more than increased population. The amount of space consumed per person has more than doubled over the past 50 years. Today, more than a quarter of the EU's territory has been directly affected by urban sprawl, according to a study by the European Environment Agency, which also suggests potential policies to combat the trend. R. Andreas Kraemer, Director Ecologic, was consulted as an external expert throughout the development of the report.

How can the effectiveness of environmental policies be assessed in retrospect? Have the stated targets of environmental policies been achieved, and if so, was it because of the policies or because of other factors? Have targets been achieved at proportionate costs, or could there have been cheaper options of reaching them? These and other questions on ex-post policy evaluation were discussed at an expert workshop convened by the European Environment Agency and the Environment Agencies of Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK. Benjamin Görlach gave an introduction to cost-effectiveness analysis as an evaluation tool, and presented experiences with ex-post cost-effectiveness analyses of environmental policies in Europe.

This OECD-report analyses selected public expenditure programmes supporting environmental investments in water supply and sanitation in four OECD countries (Austria, Belgium, France and the German New Länder) with the goal of illustrating a variety of possible institutional arrangements for the management of water sector public expenditure programmes in transition economies.

Lucha, Christine 2006: Optimisation of the share of renewable energies in electricity systems in the European Union. Cornerstones of an alternative political and institutional scenario. Fachbereich 3: Mathematik / Naturwissenschaften, Universität Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz.

This CTI Capacity Building Semniar brought together about 75 key persons from politics, business, non-governmental organisations, research institutes and think tanks from Central and Eastern European Countries, the former Soviet Union and Mongolia as well as OECD countries. Participants were given the opportunity to discuss and develop concrete projects in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They were encouraged to present first project ideas and were given the opportunity to meet experts from OECD countries to share their experiences and ideas concerning the economic potential and benefits of climate change policies. It was the 7th event of the series of CTI Capacity Building Seminars.