The projects website provides an overview of the project objectives, structure and partners as well as events and news related to relevant issues of the project. Furthermore, project outputs such as deliverables, policy briefs and publications are regularly promoted on the website. Ecologic Institute is responsible for the concept, design and programming.

The 7th workshop of the forum "Fish Protection and Downstream Migration" was dedicated to the topic of improving the implementation of measures at the end of the second cycle of the forum. The workshop took place in Dresden in April 2018. Important to this workshop was the task of creating a summary of the intense discourse that had taken place between all of the stakeholders over the past six years. These discourses were then synthesized into twelve guidelines. The recommendations and results of the event are available for download.

So far, the Urban Nature Atlas has collected evidence on 1000 nature-based solutions (NBS) interventions. With that, it provides the most comprehensive basis for the analysis of socio-economic and innovation patterns associated with urban NBS in Europe. Ecologic Institute was involved in the design and implementation of the database, which is intended to support research, policy and public relations.

The BONARES conference "Soil as a Sustainable Resource" took place in Berlin from 26 to 28 February 2018. Ecologic Institute staff attended the conference and presented the interim results of the Soil³ project – Sustainable Subsoil Management. Dr. Ana Frelih-Larsen, Senior Fellow at Ecologic Institute, gave a presentation on "Social acceptance of measures to improve the subsoil in German agriculture".

Initially developed for the Science Year 2016/*17 – Seas and Oceans of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the funding for the youth campaign "Plastic Pirates" has been extended as part of the BMBF's research focus "Plastic in the Environment". The campaign takes place from 1 May until 30 June 2018 and allows young people between 10 and 16 years old to become scientists and contribute to a large citizen science project. A second period for sampling is envisaged for 15 September until 15 November 2018. We invite all young people to join! For "Plastic Pirates", the PlastikNet team at Ecologic Institute is collaborating with the Kieler Forschungswerkstatt.

Ecoscholars was an initiative of international scholars coordinated by the Ecologic Institute. It was a discussion and networking group located in Berlin. Its members were international researchers, scholars, fellows, and professionals who were involved in climate change, energy, sustainability, and other related environmental fields.

Imagine a ceiling panel offering lighting, efficient cooling and improved acoustics all in one. Or an app that calculates the energy use of single appliances in your home as well as the cost of their power consumption at any given moment. And how about an environmentally-friendly process to insulate buildings using digitalization and robotics? These were among the innovations in the running for the PERPETUUM Energy Efficiency Prize. Dr. Camilla Bausch of Ecologic Institute headed the jury to choose the winner of the competition.

The 2018 European Think Tank Summit brings together key representatives from the think tank landscape in Europe to exchange ideas, discuss best practices and learn from each other's expertise. Ecologic Institute Director, Dr. Camilla Bausch, chaired a break-out session that addressed the complex question of using strategic communication to reach target groups in a time marked by a superabundance of information.

Stakeholder and public engagement are key elements of EU policy development, as well as of responsible research and innovation. Over a period of three years, BioSTEP has designed and implemented a wide range of citizen and stakeholder engagement activities regarding the development of Europe's bioeconomy. This paper, edited by Ecologic Institute's Holger Gerdes and Zoritza Kiresiewa, presents a set of research recommendations, which builds on the lessons learned from the application of BioSTEP's participatory tools. The BioSTEP research recommendations are available for download.

This infographic illustrates the basic principle of an extended indicator of land use and land-use change: worsening and improvements in land use are tracked and balanced against each other.

This infographic shows a procedure how to approach the operationalization of the LDN concept and which questions have to be answered in this way. It builds on the findings of 14 UNCCD pilot studies (Global Mechanism of the UNCCD 2016a) and interprets them further. It visualizes seven strategic steps.

This infographic provides a brief overview of soil values for Land Use Categories based on soil threats.

The EU project "Implementation of the EU's Action Plan for nature, people and the economy" responds to the EU Nature Directives' Fitness Check and aims to contribute to the improvement of the Nature Directives implementation. It seeks to support the Commission in the delivery of specific sub-actions of the EU Action Plan for nature, people and the economy under the Priority B 'Building political ownership and strengthening compliance'. The project is led by the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP) and is supported by Ecologic Institute and the N2K Group EEIG composed of five companies from different European regions.

At the time of their adoptions, the Water Framework Directive and later on the Floods Directive introduced many new concepts in governance, economic analysis and technical challenges for a sustainable and integrated water resources management. A lot of effort has been put into the development of River Basin Management Plans by Member States and knowledge of water status has considerably improved. Nevertheless, important differences in implementation level across the EU continue to exist and some member states or basins authorities still face difficulties in particular technical areas, which could be discussed with experts from other Member States to find alternative approaches or suggestions for improvement.

In this chapter Ecologic Institute's Dr. Ralph Bodle analyses the legal instruments and regulatory approaches in German law for achieving land degradation neutrality (LDN). Section 1 outlines the conceptual components of LDN that the law has to address: preventing degradation, restoring degraded land, offsetting degradation at project level and land-use planning and management. Section 2 analyses which legal mechanisms German law provides to address all conceptual components of LDN. The assessment and conclusion in Sect. 3 argue that despite a range of legal provisions and instruments in German law that protect soil, the absence of an overarching holistic concept is a fundamental shortcoming also with regard to LDN.