The World Cup, the European Football Championships, the Olympics: sporting events form an important part of our culture, but they also present environmental problems. Does that have to be the case? This is the question posed in the new edition of eco@work, available today.
At the 2006 World Cup the Öko-Institut proved with the “Green Goal" environmental action plan that sport and the environment are not in opposition, but on the same team. What has been done since then, and what remains to be done, so that in future major sporting events no longer take place at the expense of the environment, is reported in depth in the magazine. As well as this we have an interview with Christian Pladerer about the sustainability action plan for the Euro 2008 tournament in Austria and Switzerland and introduce the new Green Goal project for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
Click here >> to read the new edition.
The analysis covers the five largest German electricity production companies: E.ON, RWE, Vattenfall Europe, Energie Baden-Württemberg (EnBW) and Evonik Steag as well as the electricity production of these companies in Germany. The windfall profits of these companies on other European sub-markets are therefore not taken into account in the following analysis.
From international climate protection to carbon footprinting, the newly published Öko-Institut leaflet gives a valuable insight into the work and methods of the leading environmental research institute. Readers are introduced to the kinds of issues addressed by the institute’s scientists. The newly designed information leaflet is now available online, while the printed version, if required, can be ordered at redaktion(at)oeko.de.
For 30 years the Öko-Institut has been a non-profit organization. It is true that our work is financed primarily through project-related contracts and funding from public and private clients. But we still need you as a member. For our members ensure that the institute retains its strong links with society at large; they enable us to continue our crucial sustainability research and to remain financially independent in the long term.
That is why we have launched our 500plus! membership campaign. We are aiming to recruit 500 new members.
Join in! You will be helping to solve some of the pressing social challenges of today and tomorrow. Please tell other people about our campaign and write to us if you have comments or suggestions.
The Federal Environment Agency (UBA), on behalf of the German Ministry for the Environment, is funding a research project on sustainable global biomass trade, carried out by Öko-Institut and IFEU until end of 2009.
In that context, a sub-project will identify global potentials of degraded land suitable for sustainable bioenergy production. A GIS-based mapping with FAO and other global data on land cover, soil and biodiversity-relevant areas will be used to “screen” global land, and case studies in several countries will match the global screening with “bottom-up” analyses.
Politicians, scientists, environmental groups – almost everyone had great hopes that the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali – the 13th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC – would produce some very good outcomes for international climate protection. Yet assessments of what was achieved in 13 exhausting days of negotiations vary very widely. So how do the researchers at the Öko-Institut (Institute for Applied Ecology) – who were directly involved in the talks and who have been addressing urgent climate issues in numerous studies and projects for years – judge the outcomes of the Conference? Find out about this and more in this current issue of eco@work.