The implementation of Germany's highly effective Feed-in-Tariff model (FITM) for the promotion of renewable energy (RE) is a remarkable achievement given the rigid structure of the German political system. The many veto points in the political system cause certain policy inertia -Reformstau- in Germany, making comprehensive policy changes a rare occurrence. In this article, Prof. Dr. Christoph Stefes, Senior Fellow at Ecologic Institute, addresses how Germany's FITM was nonetheless passed in the 1990s, leading to a boom for renewable energy in Germany.

This project is an important project of the European Commission for preparing its comprehensive adaptation strategy. It aims at evaluating water related vulnerability to climate change impacts and identifying adequate adaptation measures. It sheds light on vulnerability and adaptive capacity in different affected sectors and across Europe’s river basins. The project shall thereby support coherency, timeliness and effectiveness of climate change adaptation efforts throughout Europe.

<p>&#13; Tanja Srebotnjak represented Ecologic Institute at the largest gathering of statisticians and practitioners of statistics in North America, the Joint Statistical Meetings, which this year took place in the Olympic City of Vancouver, Canada. Dr. Srebotnjak presented a paper on small area estimation of local health effects and risk factors illustrating her modeling and validation framework for the prevalent lack of health care insurance in the US.</p>&#13;

<p>&#13; The 7th Greifswald International Summer Academy "Energy and the Environment" was put on by the University of Greifswald. Dominic Marcellino, Fellow at Ecologic Institute in Washington, spoke to the participants, delivering remarks on some of the ethical implications of expanded renewable energy production, specifically wind.</p>&#13;

At the end of this year in Cancún, Mexico, a Roadmap for a binding climate agreement should be in place. After finding themselves at the sidelines of what was a disappointing Copenhagen summit, it is even more important that Europeans now inject new life into the negotiations.

Ecologic Institute cooperates on researching the "Environmental Security in the Arctic Ocean". The work culminates in a NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) and a book that addresses the prevention of conflicts in relation to scarcity of resources and threats to environmental security with implications for economic, cultural and political instability. The project's main sponsor is the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme (SPS).

<p>&#13; In 2010 the German Energy Agency GmbH (dena) and the German American Chambers of Commerce (AHK USA) organized the 2nd German American Energy Conference. This year’s conference was themed „Promising Markets for Renewables and Energy Efficiency”. It offered information about current trends and support frameworks within U.S. and EU energy markets and how companies can benefit from them. The event attracted more than 400 participating experts and high level speakers. Within a panel discussion Stephanie Schlegel, Fellow und Coordinator Bioenergy and Agriculture at the Ecologic Institute spoke about opportunities for German biomass companies in the U.S. market and the relevance of sustainability requirements for the further development of transatlantic bioenergy markets.</p>&#13;

The financial and economic crisis that Germany has been going through since 2008 has shed a new light on the pros and cons of economic growth and the methods of measuring welfare. Whereas some indicators indicate that the worst effects of the crisis are behind us, others reveal that we may not have seen the end of the crisis just yet. In the 2/2010 edition of “Berliner Republik”, Benjamin Görlach, Senior Fellow at the Ecologic Institute, discussed how the crisis has played out in different economic indicators, why politics still resort to GDP as the main indicator for economic welfare and what the perspectives are for establishing alternative indicators.

Electric vehicles have the potential to make significant contributions towards achieving the EU’s climate protection goals in the transport sector. However, the environmental impacts of a large scale introduction of electric vehicles are still unknown. This project develops scenarios for the increased dissemination of electric vehicles in the EU until 2050 and formulates policy recommendations from these findings. The full report of this project is available for download.

<p> In recent years, it has almost become conventional wisdom that climate change is a threat to human security. Both politicians and scientists have called climate change a conflict trigger or multiplier. However, empirically-based research on the relationship between climate change, resource scarcity and conflict is often absent. At the workshop on &quot;Climate-induced migration in the MENA&quot;, Maria Berglund presented the FP7 project &quot;Climate change, Hydro-conflicts and Human Security (CLICO)&quot;, aiming to address these research gaps.</p>

The first Smart Energy Dialog, held on 9 June 2010 in Berlin, established a forum for discussion on the co-transformation of the energy and transport sectors. Sixty European and American experts from the areas of industry, research and policy-making came together at the Hertie School of Governance to discuss a roadmap towards energy security, energy efficiency and the decarbonisation of our economies.