A group of polish local government experts, landscape planners, architects and engineers participated in a study tour on nature-based solutions in Berlin on 25 and 26 August 2020, which was part of the EUKI project "Climate NBS Poland". Nature-based solutions (NBS) can be implemented in urban settings to deliver a suite of services to address climate change, such as reduce demand for heating and cooling, stormwater management, microclimate regulation but also support human health and recreation. Thanks to their multi-functionality and sustainability NBS are increasingly applied as measures to address climate change in cities – in Berlin, a number of innovative NBS projects have been implemented in Berlin already since the 1990s to address such challenges.

On 2 July 2020, Dr. Martin Hirschnitz-Garbers and Dr. Stephan Sina from Ecologic Institute, together with Susanne Altvater from s.Pro, gave a keynote presentation "Reflections on extended producer responsibility under the EU Single-Use Plastics Directive" at the working group "Implementation of the EU Single-Use Plastics Directive" and discussed it with the participants

Creating Green Cities is a podcast on urban-nature based solutions, explained through stories of inspiring innovators from across Europe who have used their passion and creativity to make cities greener. We talk to guests from Barcelona, Budapest, Malmö and Utrecht to find out why green roofs are so cool, what happens when you start talking to hundreds of people about trees, and why it is more difficult to run a community garden than to start one.

With more than 1500 participants in the live stream and via YouTube, the online webinar "Saving the climate with knife and fork? How our eating habits affect the environment" on 18 May 2020 was a complete success. Together, Tanja Dräger de Teran (WWF) and Stephanie Wunder (Ecologic Institute), highlighted the links between daily nutritional routines and their impact on climate, land use and health.

The current global pandemic presents both risks and opportunities for the transition to a more sustainable future in Europe. At the launch event for the newest report of the German Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU), Dr. Camilla Bausch discussed the importance of the European Green Deal at this moment of crisis with Prof. Dr. Christian Calliess.

In order to overcome the negative effects of conventional meat consumption, many alternatives are emerging that could offer solutions. But is that really the case? In the webinar "The future of meat: from trend analysis to policy action" Stephanie Wunder, Senior Fellow at the Ecologic Institute and Sylvia Veenhoff from the German Federal Environment Agency (UBA) presented and discussed the results of a trend study commissioned by the UBA describing three core trends: artificial meat, plant-based meat and insect food.

In 2009, many countries adopted economic stimulus programs to combat the economic crisis. The United Nations estimated that these programs totaled three trillion Dollar. The Ecologic Institute analyzed the environmental impacts of the 2009 economic stimulus programs in Germany, France, Great Britain, Austria, Slovenia, the USA, China, Japan, South Korea and the measures taken by the EU.

Since December 2019, Ecologic Institute is a member of the PREVENT Waste Alliance. The alliance is a multi-stakeholder exchange and cooperation platform with more than 30 participant organisations from the private sector, academia and civil society, as well as government institutions. All participant organisations are involved in different aspects of waste management and circular economy across entire value chains, with particular focus on plastics and electronic waste.

On 4 March 2020 the European Commission published its proposal for a European climate law. The present Commission proposal raises a number of questions, such as what steering effect can the long-term orientation really achieve or will the climate law effectively close existing gaps in the processes of EU climate policy? Together with experts, we have further explored these questions.

The final event of the dialogue forum "Wirtschaft macht Klimaschutz" took place on 11 March 2020 in Berlin. Over the past two years, representatives from more than 100 companies have jointly developed ideas, projects and concrete steps to promote climate protection in their companies. Organised in five thematic working groups, the Dialogue Forum has brought together climate protection pioneers among German companies and facilitated exchange of ideas across sector boundaries.

In order to determine the acceptance of measures to enhance the subsoil in agriculture, Ecologic Institute organised two stakeholder workshops in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) in March 2020. The first workshop took place on 2 March in Bad Sassendorf (near Soest) and the second on 3 March in Kleve. Both were part of the BonaRes project "Soil³ – Sustainable Subsoil Management", funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

On 22 February 2020, Benedict Bueb of Ecologic Institute was invited to speak on Environmental Inequality at the International Alumni Center (iac) of the Robert Bosch Stiftung. During the workshop "Inequality: From grassroots to policy-making" he presented different perspectives on the topic. He highlighted that not only the social effects of environmental changes and environmental policy decisions, but also access to environmental policy decision-making are often very unequally distributed.

Hidden in plain sight, digitalisation has appeared as one – if not the – central force of change in the 21st century. The digital age offers the potential to both enable and radically counteract the socio-ecological transformation. Correspondingly, structuring the digitalisation wave has becomes an important factor for sustainability policy. When used wisely, artificial intelligence (AI) can produce a new level of quality for solution strategies. The question remains: do we require a new collective knowledge-based solution for using AI to address issues of sustainable transformation in organizations, economic systems and infrastructures? The Ecological Research Network (Ecornet) invited the public to discuss this question.

From 10 to 14 February 2020, the five-day PhD-WinterSchool "Plastics in the Environment" of the BMBF research focus "Plastics in the Environment – Sources ● Sinks ● Solutions" took place in Döllnsee, Brandenburg.