Cities are increasingly facing challenges from heat, heavy rainfall, and drought. Nature-based measures offer a wide range of approaches to address these developments while simultaneously improving quality of life in urban areas. This infographic series developed by Ecologic Institute illustrates ten key nature-based adaptation measures and highlights their effects on the urban climate, water balance, and biodiversity.
Climate change is affecting cities in various ways: heatwaves are becoming more frequent, flooding is occurring more often, and prolonged periods of drought are putting pressure on water resources. This series of infographics provides an overview of key climate-related risks and shows how nature-based solutions can help mitigate them.
This article examines how innovations in stakeholder engagement can contribute to sustainability transitions in water governance. Based on a systematic review of 61 studies, the paper shows that engagement approaches take diverse forms and often combine multiple governance modes. Public authorities frequently act as initiators, while civil society actors play a central role in many cases.
The transition to a clean and competitive industrial base is crucial to strengthening Europe’s resilience and strategic economic independence. The Clean Industrial Transition Monitor by ECNO assesses real-world progress using more than 50 indicators and provides a comprehensive and nuanced picture of both progress and remaining gaps.
The infographic underscores a central insight of the Clean Industrial Transition Monitor: Europe has put in place many of the necessary building blocks for a clean industrial transition. However, achieving scale will depend on addressing remaining bottlenecks and ensuring coherent implementation across all parts of the value chain.
The policy brief highlights the need for a fundamental shift in how pesticides are used in European agriculture. Rather than further optimising chemical inputs, agricultural systems need to be reoriented more broadly. To support this transition, the brief outlines concrete policy measures at EU level, including binding pesticide reduction targets, stronger support for agroecological approaches, the development of independent advisory services, fairer value chains, and increased transparency in pesticide use.
Presented at the European Carbon Farming Summit 2026, this poster highlights key findings on the risks, opportunities and policy implications of integrating temporary carbon units from carbon farming into EU agri-food climate policy.
The European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (ESABCC) has published the report “Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in the Agri-food Sector – Recommendations for a Coherent EU Policy”. The report calls on the EU to better integrate climate mitigation and adaptation across the entire value chain. Its aim is to safeguard food security, strengthen farmers’ livelihoods and align the agri-food system with the EU’s climate goals.
Nature-based climate adaptation unfolds not only in urban space but also in public perception. Measures such as urban greening, water retention or heat action plans require clear and targeted communication in order to be understood, accepted and supported. A new short guide published by the German Environment Agency outlines how municipalities can use press work strategically to communicate nature-based climate adaptation in a clear and structured way.
Nature-based climate adaptation can only be effective if it reaches the people it is meant to serve. Inclusive public communication plays a key role in this process: it helps ensure that nature-based solutions are not only planned and implemented but also understood, accepted and shaped by a wide range of communities. This guide, published by the German Environment Agency, provides practical guidance on how municipalities can design inclusive communication strategies for nature-based climate adaptation.
What do shaded paths, green roofs and restored waterways have in common? In many cities, they are already part of the urban landscape – yet often remain unnoticed. This guide, published by the German Environment Agency, focuses on these existing measures. It explains how municipalities can use city maps to make nature-based climate adaptation visible, place it in context and communicate it in a transparent and accessible way.
The CAP Strategic Plans (CSPs) bring together a wide range of instruments designed to address environmental and climate objectives. This combination of instruments is referred to as 'green architecture' (GA). These guidelines support managing authorities and evaluators in assessing how these instruments function collectively. The focus is not on individual measures in isolation but on analysing the GA as an integrated system.
This policy brief assesses how relevant CAP instruments currently address pesticide use and identifies adjustments to better support and accelerate the transition toward more sustainable farming practices.
This policy brief examines how current climate-action rewarding mechanisms address – or fail to address – organic farming as a systemic and climate-resilient approach. It analyses existing monetary, regulatory and supportive instruments at EU level, with a particular focus on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming (CRCF) Regulation.
Drawing on structured expert workshops across Europe, this study identifies key scientific, governance, and socio-economic conditions for making MPAs “climate-ready”. The findings highlight that resilient MPAs must be ecologically robust, socially inclusive, supported by coherent governance frameworks, and adaptable to changing ocean conditions.
Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are key to conserving biodiversity and strengthening the resilience of marine social-ecological systems. As climate change intensifies, their effectiveness increasingly depends on integrating climate considerations into design, management, and governance. The infographic, "Towards Climate-Ready Marine Protected Areas: Challenges and Strategic Pathways," visualises the conceptual approach of the underlying study. It combines ecological, governance, and socio-economic aspects and shows how they work together to evaluate and improve the climate-readiness of MPAs.
The toolkit brings together tried-and-tested instruments and organises them along a typical municipal workflow: from initial orientation and planning through to implementation, maintenance, monitoring and evaluation. Local authority departments, planners and other stakeholders will find concise fact sheets outlining each tool, advice on how to apply it at different project stages, as well as links to further resources and practical examples.
This publication provides a quantitative overview of the development and status of environmental crime in Germany between 2013 and 2024, based on data from the police crime statistics ("Polizeiliche Kriminalstatistik") and the Federal Statistical Office's criminal prosecution statistics ("Strafverfolgungsstatistik"). The report provides both an overview of general trends and an in-depth account of individual environmental offences. The report was prepared by a team from Ecologic Institute on behalf of the German Federal Environment Agency.