European Union

US Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue has voiced concerns that the EU Green Deal could undermine trade and affect the “viability of EU farmers”, a claim that has been refuted by his EU counterpart.

The European Investment Bank issued a €350 million loan on Thursday (30 July) to a Swedish company that hopes to corner a significant share of the global battery market by building the greenest power packs available.

Worldwide jurisdictions and particularly the EU and the US should formulate "common visions" on how best to regulate competition in the platform economy, the Commission's digital chief Margrethe Vestager has said.

Despite major disruptions to production and assembly in the first semester, installation of new wind farms over the first half of 2020 was comparable to previous years, industry figures show.

Protests in Bulgaria against the government of Boyko Borissov grew stronger on Wednesday (29 July), the 21st day of revolt, as citizens blocked major crossroads, including a key Danube bridge at the country’s border with Romania at Russe-Giurgiu.

Europe’s hydrogen strategy mostly points in the right direction by identifying renewable hydrogen as a key energy vector and necessary storage solution for delivering a zero-carbon EU, but it side-steps several key problems that go to the core of what...

A communication channel set up in 2018 to discuss incidents along the front lines could be used for sharing preventative information to protect farmers and minimise risks of escalation on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, a recent report from the International Crisis Group  (ICG) suggests.

Anti-Western messages in Georgia have doubled in number, with a particular increase in anti-American and anti-NATO messages related to the US support on security issues and the post-Soviet country’s integration into the transatlantic defence alliance, a recent report has found....

Social media giant Facebook has come in for heavy criticism as part of a US congressional hearing into the dominance of online tech platforms, being accused of ‘copy, acquire and kill’ tactics as part of its history in acquiring smaller...

World Trade Organization members are likely to refrain from appointing an interim director-general to succeed Roberto Azevedo when he steps down at the end of August, two sources following the process said on Wednesday (29 July), after Washington's insistence on a US candidate caused a deadlock.

Authorities in the Spanish capital Madrid backtracked on Wednesday (29 July) over a highly-criticised plan to give an "immunity card" to people testing positive for coronavirus antibodies so they can enjoy higher-risk areas like gyms, bars and museums.

European airline and airport executives urged the Canadian government this week to allow a safe "restoration of travel" between Canada and Europe, adding industry pressure on Ottawa to remove coronavirus-related restrictions that have discouraged international air travel.

AMENDMENTS 1 - 323 - Draft report Report on the implementation of the EU Association Agreement with the Republic of Moldova
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Dragoş Tudorache

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

Greenhouse gas monitoring – and increasingly climate policy monitoring, meaning the continuous tracking of policies with indicators – has existed since the early 1990s – and is thus a long-standing practice. For a long time, most people thought it to be a very technical exercise of low politics, but our new work demonstrates that this is no longer the case.

The EU’s 2050 ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions target means that substantial emissions reductions will have to happen in every policy sector, be it energy, agriculture or transport. We argue in a new open access paper in the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning that the EU must continue to enhance its capacity for policy monitoring to be able to verify continuous progress in each sector.

Especially in the wake of the 2015 Paris Agreement, policy monitoring and review has become the core way in which the international community seeks to reach climate targets. Building on this approach, there are now new efforts to supplement the reporting on individual climate policies through the EU’s Monitoring Mechanism with ‘harder’ elements.

‘Harder’ elements may be understood as efforts to enhance the policy steering capacity of ‘softer’ policy monitoring. In our paper, we demonstrate that recent legislative revisions of the monitoring mechanism have introduced several of these ‘harder’ elements. These include making the monitoring more specific (by, for example requiring the EU Member States to report on their low-carbon development strategies and on climate adaptation), enhancing the publicity of monitoring data and thus its visibility, and linking the monitoring more closely with effort sharing mechanisms and the emerging Energy Union. See Table 1.

These harder elements emerged from an entrepreneurial Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Environment Agency, all of which preferred enhanced climate policy monitoring. Member State support for these efforts proved more ambivalent, leading to some compromises in for example not making all aspects of climate policy monitoring legally binding.

The underlying idea is that transparency, coupled with pressure from national peers and potentially the public (the hardening elements), will push the Member States onto a policy path that is consistent with net zero emissions by 2050. Furthermore, focusing on policy monitoring rather than on prescribing particular policies may also allow for greater flexibility in experimenting with different solutions, and help identify the most effective approaches.

It appears that the European Green Deal, as well as the proposed European Climate Law also build on the presence of monitoring provisions. However, the ultimate effects of seeking to enhance policy effectiveness with monitoring remain uncertain, because in spite of some analysis of policy monitoring efforts – to which our work contributes – researchers are only just beginning to assess the capacity of policy monitoring in delivering policy outcomes that contribute to a stable climate.

References:

Schoenefeld, J.J. & Jordan, A. (2020). Towards Harder Soft Governance? Monitoring Climate Policy in the EU. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1523908X.2020.1792861 [OPEN ACCESS]

Schoenefeld, J. J., Schulze, K., Hildén, M., & Jordan, A. J. (2019). Policy Monitoring in the EU: The Impact of Institutions, Implementation, and Quality. Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 60(4), 719-741. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11615-019-00209-2 [OPEN ACCESS]

The post Guiding Europe Towards Faster and Deeper Decarbonisation: An Enhanced Role for Policy Monitoring? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The German meat industry has been under fire for years over its low working standards and workers rights. The coronavirus clusters in slaughterhouses have now offered the government an opportunity to intervene. EURACTIV Germany reports.

US Defense Secretary Mark Esper outlined plans on Wednesday (29 July) to take thousands of US troops out of Germany by shifting some of the forces to Italy and Belgium, ending weeks of uncertainty over US troop withdrawal strategy in Europe.

An amendment tabled in the new UK agriculture bill, designed to allow access to new gene-editing technology, has been withdrawn but the government has pledged to conduct a public consultation on the issue, amid indications that it could eventually be in favour.

Though the coronavirus is still on our radars, countries have been gradually easing lockdown all over Europe and getting back to work, even going on holidays, and reuniting with their families. The Martens Centre wants to hear from its like-minded...

Have leading politicians in the grand coalition up to the Chancellor been involved in a fraudulent scheme? The Bundestag's finance committee is looking into it.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has pledged to hire more people from racial minorities after meeting anti-racist MEPs on Tuesday