Green Deal - Big Deal‪?‬ Ecologic Institute

Air pollution has been a long-standing environmental problem in Europe. Though significant progress has been made, over 90% of the EU’s urban population is still exposed to air pollution levels exceeding the science-based guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO). The fight for better air quality in the EU is not over – and it’s a battle in which citizens can take an active part.

The journey to net-zero emissions requires thousands of different policy interventions at all sorts of different times and across all sectors. Similarly, an orchestra is made up of many different instruments - all of which have to play the same tune at the right time! The conductor makes sure that all these different instruments do exactly that. Likewise, a governance framework plays that role in climate policy: it makes sure that all the policies are playing the same tune, working together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect and restore nature.

How do we classify which investments are the right ones to power the transition to a climate and nature-friendly economy? This is a pretty big question, and one that is crucial to a successful implementation of the European Green Deal. The EU taxonomy – the subject of our latest episode - specifies the various criteria that investments will need to fulfill to be considered sustainable. In practice, the taxonomy is a long list of economic activities with benchmark performance standards.

Since we learned how to produce plastic, humans have manufactured more than 8.3 billion tons of it – most of which ended up as a waste product, somewhere on the planet. This leads plastic waste to enter the landscape, rivers, beaches, and eventually ocean. We asked our listeners what, in their opinion, is the issue with plastic pollution. The answers ranged from negative impacts on human health and the environment to lack of recycling infrastructure and the global dimension of the plastics problem.

So how can we possibly address a problem of this size? In the latest “Green Deal – Big Deal?” podcast episode, the host Ewa Iwaszuk and a guest co-host Linda Mederake from Ecologic Institute try to get to the bottom of the problem of plastic pollution, together with their interview guests Frieder Rubik (Institute for Ecological Economic Research) and Jean-Pierre Schweitzer (European Environmental Bureau) who share interesting information and perspectives regarding plastic pollution.

In Europe and beyond, the summer of 2022 is hot. Very hot. A runway at a London airport melted in the heat and from Paris to Warsaw the grass in parks turned dry and yellow. The Rhine – the river flowing through Rotterdam, Köln and Strasbourg – is running dry. This is the same river that catastrophically flooded a year ago, destroying towns in Germany and Belgium. The impact of climate change on urban areas in Europe is unmistakable.
On one of those days when the temperature hit 30 degrees, the “Green Deal – Big Deal?” podcast host Ewa Iwaszuk from Ecologic Institute in Berlin speaks with her guests about the climate change impacts in cities and especially about the EU's plans on how to adapt to and better deal with those impacts. The discussion focuses on the possibilities that nature offers to help us cope with challenges such as heat and flooding.

Food production is a sector completely dependent on healthy environment and predictable climatic conditions. At the same time, modern agriculture is among the major contributors to climate and biodiversity crises.
In the most recent episode of the “Green Deal—Big Deal?” podcast we ask our expert guests about the food systems approach adopted by the European Commission's “Farm to fork” strategy and investigate how the strategy will impact producers, consumers and the global food markets. We discuss strategies to address food waste and explore why meat is a politically sensitive topic.