The Arctic Summer College is a virtual campus for learning about the environment in the Arctic and exchanging ideas on how the world can protect the Arctic from negative impacts of human activities in the High North. The college focuses on climate change adaptation, natural resource management, biodiversity protection, environmental governance, and human health. The Arctic Summer College 2016 enabled participants to be better prepared to finding solutions and implementing these in social and political processes.

The REFRESH Food Waste Solution Contest brings much-deserved recognition to solutions to the problem of food waste and encourage their spread. Anyone from Europe that has developed a food waste innovation – including individuals, organisations, start-ups and large companies – was encouraged to submit a video or visual essay about their project.

The issue of closing mineral cycles was analyzed in eight European regions and the results are presented in the report "Resource Efficiency in Practice – Closing Mineral Cycles". The authors of BIO IS, Ecologic Institute, AMEC, Danish Technical University, University of Milano and LEI, identified measures that support the closing of mineral cycles within the study regions. For each region, practical and strategic options to reduce the nutrient surplus further were derived.

The objective of this project is to provide clarity on the legal nature of the allowances traded in the the EU Emission Trading System. This exludes international carbon units (e.g. assigned amount units (AAUs), certified emission reductions (CERs), emission reduction units (ERUs)) pursuant to the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The objective of this briefing was to provide Members with an overview of the key issues at stake at the CITES COP 17 and to introduce the new role of the EU as a single Party entity. A short overview of the history of CITES was provided, along with the current positions of the main Parties on key issues of importance. The brief identified main conclusions and recommendations for Members of the ENVI Committee to establish their own perspectives on the subject of CITES and the potential role of the EU. The briefing was conducted using published documents, press releases, official position papers, studies and other relevant sources from national, international and EU institutions and NGOs. The document is available for download.

High-impact storm events have demonstrated the vulnerability of coastal zones in Europe and beyond. These impacts are likely to increase due to predicted climate change and ongoing coastal development. In order to reduce impacts, disaster risk reduction (DRR) measures need to be taken, which prevent or mitigate the effects of storm events.This paper gives an overview of the products and results obtained in the FP7-funded project RISC-KIT, which aims to develop and apply a set of tools with which highly-vulnerable coastal areas (so-called "hotspots") can be identified. The paper is available for download.

China is increasingly at the centre of discussions about climate policy, as its government is designing a nationwide greenhouse gas emission trading system (ETS) to be implemented in 2017. The European Union (EU) is supporting this effort by sharing expertise about and experiences from Europe's ETS – the world's biggest and longest-running carbon market – with Chinese experts and policymakers. China is already home to several pilot ETS in various provinces, which constitute active carbon markets from which to gain experiences that can inform the future national programme.

Offsetting is seen as a mechanism that can contribute to curb the growing emissions from the aviation sector. This report investigates the way air carriers currently engage in offsetting, with a focus on the offset project types, credits, and entities involved. It consolidates evidence of offsetting practices from over 30 air carriers. The report is available for download.

This paper presents a collection of six essays, in which climate policy experts express the different views on the EU crisis from Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Lisbon, London and Warsaw. The paper is available for download.

On 14 October 2016, the documentary film "Soils2Sea: Reducing nutrient loadings into the Baltic Sea" premiered in Poland. Developed and produced by Dr. Grit Martinez (Ecologic Institute) and Anne Berrini (berrini films) with support from Dr. Przemyslaw Wachniew (AGH University of Science and Technology Krakow), the movie illustrates the societal story of implementing the EU's nitrate directive at regional realities in the EU member states, particularly in the Kocinka catchment area in south central Poland. The 35-minute film will be available soon on Ecologic Institute's website.

From 4 until 6 September 2016 the Estuarine & Coastal Sciences Association (ECSA) held its 56th multidisciplinary research conference entitled "Coastal systems in transition from a 'natural' to an 'anthropogenically modified' state" in Bremen (Germany). Dr. Grit Martinez of Ecologic Institute and Prof. Paolo Ciavola of the University of Ferrara hosted a special session on "Practical illustration of the human dimension in coastal systems and its drivers for change". Presenters from the FP7-Project RISC-KIT highlighted the state of the art of their interdisciplinary research on reducing human risk in coastal areas which was complimented by further participants from other European and world-wide research projects. The presentation slides are available for download.

On the occasion of the US release of Michael McCarthy's "The Moth Snowstorm" on 3 October 2016, NYU Washington, DC, the Ecologic Institute and the New York Review of Books hosted a reading and discussion on joy, nature and the 21st-century city with Michael McCarthy, three-time Environment Journalist of the Year in the UK and author of The Moth Snowstorm, with special guests Jann Rosen-Queralt, artist and art instructor at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA); and Dr. Sabine O'Hara, Dean of CAUSES (College of Agriculture, Urban Sustainability & Environmental Sciences) at University of the District of Columbia. Brendan O’Donnell moderated the evening.

The Brexit, migration, the Euro crisis, continued economic malaise, and the rise of EU-sceptical parties and nationalist sentiment across Europe – the European Union (EU) is in turbulence. In a new paper Ecologic Institute analyses how the concurrent crises could affect EU climate and energy policy. The paper is available for download.

The Paris Agreement requires Parties to scale up their commitments every five years, i.e., with each consecutive "nationally determined contribution" (NDC). The recent proposal of the EU Commission for an Effort Sharing Regulation is essential for the EU to meet this obligation. The proposal, however, does not support adequately continuous scaling up of the EU greenhouse gas reduction targets. A new paper from Ecologic Institute discusses ways in which the Effort Sharing Regulation could support the scaling up of EU climate targets. The paper is available for download.

A consortium including Ecologic Institute has been commissioned by the European Commission to provide support in the evaluation of the contribution of Rural Development Programmes (RDPs) to the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and Floods Directive (FD).