Environmental law is only effective if people comply with it. In order to improve compliance assurance of (European) environmental law, an action plan has been adopted at European level. Studies show that compliance with environmental law must also be improved in Germany. Following-up on these ideas, the Ecologic Institute, in cooperation with its partners (GAF AG and Dr. Aron Buzogány), puts them into practice in the project "Legal and technical review of selected questions of compliance assurance at European and national level".

While circular processes offer potential for small and large companies, such processes are not (yet) established across the board. For circular processes to be applied widespread, exchange between science and companies must be improved. As part of an national research project funding scheme on the sustainable economy, three workshops were dedicated to businesses and science actors to exchange information on sustainability innovations along value chains. This German paper summarises experiences made and lessons learned from these workshops.

The consequences of climate change are much more visible in the Arctic than in other regions of the world. The increasing loss of sea ice allows to use parts of the Arctic Ocean for a longer time and more intensively than before. This could threaten biodiversity in the polar region critically. Ecologic Institute and its partners are analyzing how a network of marine protected areas in the region could help to conserve marine biodiversity and ensure the functioning of marine ecosystems and their effective management.

In this position paper the Ecologic Institute, the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP), the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI) submitted a contribution to the EU Commission's roadmap consultation on the Farm to Fork strategy. The strategy is expected to be finalized until 29 April 2020 and will have an impact on the future Common agricultural policy. The position paper identifies the needs for the strategy and gives policy recommendations.

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.

The Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB) and the Àerea Metropolitanade Barcelona (AMB) invited Doris Knoblauch from Ecologic Institute to speak at the workshop "Metropolitan Challenges in the post 2020 European Union" in Barcelona (Spain), on 10 March 2020. In her presentation, the expert discussed the substantive and organisational importance of the European Green Deal for cities and metropolitan areas.

The EU is to be climate-neutral by 2050. In March 2020, the European Commission presented its draft law, which for the first time legally anchors the goal of climate neutrality. This is a milestone in climate protection policy. Ursula von der Leyen even compared this goal with the moon landing.

Under its 'Framework contract for Evaluation, review and development of EU Water Policy', the European Commission DG Environment has issued a service request for a Specific Contract to provide "Support for the intercomparison of Good Ecological Potential for Heavily Modified Water Bodies and elaboration of a technical document on sediment management in the context of the Water Framework Directive". The aim of this Specific Contract is to ensure support for the follow-up activities towards the further elaboration of deliverables concerning Good Ecological Potential and sediment management as outlined in the 2019-2021 work programme for the ECOSTAT working group of the WFD Common Implementation Strategy.

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 EU Commission's proposal for an EU climate law marks important progress. It sets an unmistakable target for climate neutrality in the EU by 2050, writes Nils Meyer-Ohlendorf in the Tagesspiegel. Nevertheless, the proposal has five gaps that should be closed during the legislative process.

The Ecologic Institute and the European Climate Foundation (ECF) hold an online conference on the forthcoming EU Climate Law. The European Commission's proposal for a European climate law was discussed with insight from experts and policy-makers and followed up by an exchange with the about 90 participants.

Despite numerous efforts to promote and implement more integrated approaches, coordination problems persist and impede sustainable water governance and management. This paper introduces a framework for guiding a transdisciplinary diagnostic approach (i.e. a context-sensitive assessment of multi-level water governance, which is combined with a change management process) to address such coordination problems. The approach aims at addressing some of the challenges identified in scientific scholarship and water governance practice by combining context-specific participatory assessments of individual cases with comparative case analysis guided by a generic conceptual framework.

The European Union is strongly committed to shifting to a competitive, low-carbon circular economy. The first European Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP) from December 2015 set a framework for stimulating the transition towards a circular economy. It is foreseen to revise the CEAP in 2020 to further strengthen the momentum and enable businesses, industry and society to transition to a circular economy.

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.

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.