On 29 March, the Portuguese EU Council presidency officially launches the European Year of Rail. Germanwatch and other European NGOs have send an open letter to the Commission and the Portuguese presidency to call for a European rail renaissance.
For a year and a half, representatives from the real economy, the financial sector, academia and civil society fought hard to reach an agreement on how Germany could become a prime hub for sustainable finance . On February 25, the final report of the German government's Sustainable Finance Advisory Council (SFB) was published, with ambitious recommendations on how to make the financial market more sustainable: Shifting the Trillions - A Sustainable Financial System to facilitate the Great Transformation. It is now the government's turn to translate the recommendations into an effective strategy and initiate the first legislative changes before the end of this legislative term.
This year will be key for future climate policy and especially for sustainable finance in Germany and Europe. Sustainable Finance plays a crucial role in improving climate protection and sustainable growth. To this end, Germanwatch joined forces with the Alliance for Corporate Transparency in order to push towards greater corporate responsibility and disclosure requirements to meet the EU and Paris climate targets. This article kicks off and introduces our briefing series "Full Disclosure: Monthly Briefing on EU Corporate Transparency Regulation", in which we aim to shed light on the need for and benefits of forward-looking reporting requirements in a changing EU regulatory environment.
The energy transition requires a restructuring of the energy system and, as a result of decentralisation, also increasing digitalisation to integrate all actors and make them more flexible. However, digitalisation can be shaped and should happen under ecological and social premises. In this paper we present the challenges and evince possible solutions.
In order for the socio-ecological transformation to succeed, actors from civil society, politics, the private sector and academia must work together at an eye level to develop common goals and cooperate to achieve them. This is where the concept of multi-actor partnership (MAP) comes in: Based on the assumption that committed cooperation leads to viable solutions, multi-actor partnerships must take into account and take seriously the complex interests of the actors involved and affected. Thus, they are much more than just a consultation round of different partners. The analysis and the recommendations derived from it are based on the experience gained by local partners in tandem with Germanwatch in seven MAPs in the field of climate, energy and just transformation in different country contexts.
