This report provides the context and justification for the development of BE-Rural's Sustainability Screening, a description of its methodological procedure, and the syntheses of results from the two experimental implementations of the approach in the Stara Zagora and Vidzeme regions, which are included in full as annexes to this report. The last chapters present the main lessons learned from these two pilots and the overall conclusions of the task.

In March 2022, at the resumed fifth meeting of the United Nations Environment Assembly, UN Member States adopted the historic decision to start negotiating a global treaty to combat plastic pollution. As national delegations and relevant stakeholders in Asia start preparing for the upcoming negotiations, this report by Linda Mederake and Doris Knoblauch (both Ecologic Institute), aims to provide an analysis of the region’s opportunities to end single-use plastics (SUPs) pollution through the development of this new global treaty.

In this Ariadne publication, experts from Ecologic Institute, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, Stiftung Umweltenergierecht, ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research and IER Stuttgart analyzed various options for the relief and level of the CO2 price – and identified advantages and disadvantages as well as implementation requirements of different design options. The focus is on two key political points of contention, where scientific findings can prevent an impending hardening of the position and thus promote a consensus that is conducive to climate protection.

Experts from Ecologic Institute, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, Stiftung Umweltenergierecht, ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research and IER Stuttgart analyzed various options for the relief and level of the CO2 price – and identified advantages and disadvantages as well as implementation requirements of different design options. The focus is on two key political points of contention, where scientific findings can prevent an impending hardening of the position and thus promote a consensus that is conducive to climate protection. This German-language abridged version summarizes the findings.

The aim of this strategy paper is to summarise the results of the National Dialogue on Food Systems on the two thematic areas "Food Economy of the Future" and "Food of the Future – More Plant-Based", particularly with regard to the policy options and instruments discussed there.

This report analysed if and how EU Member States used their auctioning revenues from the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) for climate action. For this purpose, we selected eight case study countries, namely Czech, Germany, Greece, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Portugal. As part of these case studies, we examined the reporting, the legal provisions and the political narrative around auctioning revenues through desk research and expert interviews.

As part of the project Dialogue Forum "Private Households", a mapping of existing actors and initiatives in Germany was carried out and evaluated. The aim of this structured categorisation is to gain an overview of the current landscape of measures in order to identify which effective starting points are already covered by current measures and which are not, and how existing measures can be improved and their effectiveness increased.

The publication summarizes the key messages from all 20 joint research projects and the seven cross-cutting topics of the German research focus "Plastics in the Environment". Structured by main topics, the central results are presented in order to derive recommendations for various addressees. More than 70 researchers and practitioners from across the research focus have jointly co-authored the key messages.

This report takes stock of emission trajectories, climate policies and complementary policies in G7 countries. It helps to identify gaps in the existing policy landscape of global decarbonisation efforts and proposes potential improvements. Based on these insights, we consider that G7 countries have many viable options for accelerating the global energy transition.

This paper describes important findings from the project "Data Governance and Regulation for a Sustainable Berlin" and formulates – in addition to the application field-specific papers – overarching recommendations.

The EU has set out to become the world's first climate-neutral continent, but how are its regions progressing towards this goal? A new report commissioned by the European Parliament assesses this question. It discusses how progress towards net-zero can be measured on regional level and identifies common barriers facing regional governments. The study is based on six case studies from EU regions that have successfully begun the journey towards net neutrality. For the report, Ecologic Institute provided conceptual input on how to define climate neutrality and on how to gauge regions' progress towards it. In addition, the team carried out the case study on industry decarbonisation in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

This final report assesses the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) provisions of the SUP-Directive with a view to its implementation in the Member States. The focus of this analysis lays on those aspects that represent novelties as compared to other EU legislation on EPR, and thus raise legal questions that have not been addressed before, especially regarding the cleaning up of litter from relevant SUP products.

The central objective of the work presented in this report was to assess the European Commission's Strategic Long-Term Vision and supplementary materials and reflect on them in light of state-of-the-art sector analyses.

This paper examines the concept of an "extended" digital product passport from a socio-ecological perspective using the example of batteries for electric vehicles. It evaluates different approaches to data regulation and formulates policy recommendations for decision makers in Berlin. It is based on preliminary work from the project, in which in particular three ideal types of data regulation and a methodology for their scenario-based evaluation were developed.

The European Commission's Fit for 55 package proposes two significant reforms to energy pricing in the EU: Energy Taxation Directive (ETD) reform; and extending emissions trading to cover emissions from buildings and road transport (ETS2). A concern among stakeholders is how these reforms would impact lower income households. Various policy mechanisms are under consideration to help address potential distributional impacts. Based on a microsimulation model developed by the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) with IEEP, this report analyses a series of reform scenarios supported by graphical depictions of their distributional effects in Germany.