Interactions between climate and resource policy – the so-called "climate-resource-nexus" – still need to be much better understood and potential impacts of effective policies systemically analysed. Against this background, the final conference served to present and discuss key findings from the ICARE project, in particular results from system dynamics model simulations of potential environmental and economic impacts of different climate protection and resource policy measures in different world regions.

Natural resource extraction and processing accounted for 23 % of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2015. Therefore, reducing resource use through resource efficiency promises significant contributions to climate protection. This "climate-resource-nexus" has mostly been explored from a scientific, Global North-oriented perspective. In this article, researchers from the Ecologic Institute analyze the potential interactions between climate and resource policy in different world regions. They did not find a generic climate-resource-nexus policy. The article is available online.

Decoupling economic growth and resource use is a core objective of the "European Green Deal". How this is to be achieved is formulated in the new "Action Plan for the Circular Economy" and the "Industrial Strategy" of 2020. Reason enough to take a closer look at the current but also the older strategy papers – which concrete goals do the strategy papers contain – and which ones not? Which areas are addressed and which measures proposed – and what is announced for the near future? Is today's resource conservation policy more ambitious than in its early days? This paper presents the key political documents of European resource policy and traces lines of development.

This ICARE-project online seminar served to discuss issues and relevance of the climate-resources-nexus among academic institutions. Mandy Hinzmann from Ecologic Institute, Dr. Thomas Gibon from Luxembourg Institute for Science and Technology LIST and Prof. Edgar Hertwich from Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU presented findings of recent research projects dealing with the nexus.

As part of the ICARE-project (Interactions between international measures for Climate Action and Resource Efficiency), the present study aimed to investigate key findings on the climate-resource-nexus from literature and identify international measures for climate protection and resource conservation. The study then analysed these measures as regards (i.) possible interactions (synergies and trade-offs) between them and (ii.) their potential relevance and fit for different world regions.

Climate and resource policy are important fields of action at international and national level. In contrast to climate protection, there is no international policy regime for resource conservation and its societal relevance appears lower than for climate protection. However, scientific findings and political debates are increasingly pointing out that climate protection and resource conservation must be considered together, since interactions can offer both synergies and trade-offs. For example, saving primary raw material use by fostering recycling could help reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Renewable energy technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions require large quantities of metallic and mineral raw materials whose extraction and production are associated with environmental impacts (e.g., land consumption and environmental pollution due to the extraction of mineral resources as well as energy-intensive processing) and which are partly considered as critical raw materials. Hence, in the context of the nexus of resource conservation and greenhouse gas neutrality, positive and negative effects on resource consumption and energy consumption are equally conceivable.