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The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is designed to ensure that European industrial companies remain competitive despite rising carbon prices. The CBAM thus enables ambitious European climate policy. However, it only covers imports into the EU: The question of whether and how the EU should take action to secure the competitiveness of exporting companies is still unresolved. This study offers answers to precisely this question.
The Digital Product Passport (DPP) is comparable to a comprehensive digital index card or a “digital CV” that the EU seeks to introduce for a wide range of products. It is intended to provide information needed, for example, for more efficient repair and recycling of products. We believe that the DPP has a significant potential to pave the way towards a more circular economy as it can address the information deficit along a circular value chain that often impeded circularity.
Steering the steel industry towards a climate-neutral future is a major challenge. However, it is also a great opportunity: steel sector is responsible for approximately 30% of industrial greenhouse gas emissions in Germany – and, by extension, for 7% of national emissions. This means that a climate-neutral steel industry will allow us to take a major step closer to meeting the German and international climate targets. This policy paper highlights how we can get there and which technologies will play a key role.
Year after year, the CCPI finds economically developed countries from the Global North, including many EU countries, contributed disproportionally to global warming. Factors such as high greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, lagging climate policy, and high energy use are responsible for a low rank in the CCPI. However, which are the worst polluters, and why? The CCPI can identify them in several easy-to-understand ways. It shows their poor climate performance and opportunities for them to improve on it and take effective climate action.
In the EU, reform of the Stability and Growth Pact is on the agenda. German and French civil society organisations therefore call in their joint letter to the German Federal Minister of Finance and his French counterpart for the relaxation of the rules of the Stability and Growth Pact in combination with the establishment of a new EU climate and biodiversity fund. Investments in the green and just transition are essential to ensure the resilience, prosperity, and social justice of our economies and societies.
On April 18, the European Parliament will vote on the reform of the Emissions Trading System (ETS) and the new Social Climate Fund (SCF). European NGOs, including Germanwatch, have published a joint statement emphasising the importance of the new fund to ensure social justice. However, Germanwatch and the other signatories call for a substantial increase in funding to ensure that European climate action is fair and just.
On Friday, 10 March 2023, the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council (FAC) adopted its conclusions on climate and energy diplomacy for this year, entitled: ‘Bolstering EU climate and energy diplomacy in a critical decade’. In this blog post, we present the key priorities to which the Council agreed and highlight the areas where the EU needs to provide more clarity and increase its ambition.
For a climate-friendly and sustainable economy in rural regions that is both resilient and adaptable, ecological and social objectives must be pursued from the outset. This is not a contradiction, but an imperative necessity if structurally weak regions are to be fit for the future and not left behind. In this policy brief, we develop and discuss recommendations for rural regions with comparable contexts that are going through similar bottom-up processes.
