In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama declared the need for "serious investments in clean energy" because "the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy". In a new paper funded by the German Marshall Fund of the United States under the Transatlantic Climate Bridge initiative, authors from the Ecologic Institute in Washington DC and Berlin identify investment needs and policy incentives required to achieve this transition to a clean energy economy.

The National Renewable Energy Action Plans offer a unique insight into the energy policy context of each EU Member State. For a comparative analysis of six European action plans, Katharina Umpfenbach and Stephan Sina contributed a review of Germany's action plan.

Grünig, Max; Ian Skinner; Mary Ann Kong 2010: Study on Consumer Information on Fuel Economy and CO2 Emissions of New Passenger Cars. Implementation of the Directive 1999/94/EC. Brussels.

EU water policy under the 10th European Development Fund has shifted its focus away from Public Private Partnerships (PPP) in water management in ACP countries towards Public-Public (PuP) Partnerships. PUPs are new partnerships developed between public water operators, communities, trade unions and other key groups, without profit motive and on a basis of equality. The Overseas Development Institute (Josephine Tucker and Roger Calow) and Ecologic Institute (Darla Nickel and Thomas Thaler) conducted a study for the European Parliament that provided an evaluation of the comparative advantage of different partnership approaches in water policy.

In her publication for the Journal for New Energy Law (Zeitschrift für Neues Energierecht), Anke Rostankowski, Associate of Ecologic Institute, investigates the prerequisites for a sustainable energy supply. She also analyses the effects of the market integration of renewable energies on their own further development.

Tanja Srebotnjak, Senior Fellow at Ecologic Institute, with co-authors Professor Christopher Murray and Professor Ali Mokdad from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, published a methods paper in Population Health Metrics on small area estimation.

The main focus of the study is to investigate a system of payment "euro-compatible" which could allow remunerating the farmer for the environmental services provided by the wet buffer strip. The study is available for download.

Bosello, Francesco; Aaron Best and Francesca Ciampalin 2009: Full set of baseline indicators. Internal report (D 4.1).

Water resource licensing is increasingly becoming a cornerstone of integrated water resources management (IWRM). Licensing and other allocation mechanisms are important because they determine who gets access to water and provide a means of managing water fairly, efficiently and sustainably. As water grows scarce in an increasing number of countries, there is a significantly greater risk of corruption in the water licensing process. These risks, and their underlying factors, are not well understood. The authors of the report explore the nature of the risk of corruption using a 2007 field study, with Chile and Kazakhstan as case studies.

Winkel, Georg; Timo Kaphengst; Sophie Herbert et al. 2009: EU policy options for the protection of European forests against harmful impacts. Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Institute of Forest and Environmental Policy/Ecologic Institute, Berlin.

Görlach, Benjamin; Nils Meyer-Ohlendorf; Michael Kohlhaas 2009: Nachhaltig aus der Krise. Analyse möglicher Beiträge einer ökologischen Finanzreform.

Ribeiro, M., Losenno, C., Dworak, T., Massey, E., Swart, R., Benzie, M., Laaser, C. 2009. Design of guidelines for the elaboration of Regional Climate Change Adaptations Strategies. Study for European Commission - DG Environment - Tender DG ENV. G.1/ETU/2008/0093r. Ecologic Institute, Vienna.

Using different scenarios of socio-economic and climate development, this study examines potential impacts of climate change on Germany's financial budget. Additionally, the authors include effects of demographic change and assess the scope for action of public authorities.

With the plenary speech of the 3rd bioenergy forum Dr. Bernhard Dreher from the German Federal Ministry for the Environment and Jessica Löhndorf, Fellow at Ecologic Institute introduce the European sustainability requirements for biofuels and vegetable oils, which were transposed into German legislation in 2009. Germany was the first member state to implement the sustainability certification in Europe. The authors explain their practical implementation in Germany.

This working paper affirms that emissions trading systems currently under development in the US raise certain challenges for an operational market link, but are not generally incompatible. Specifically, certain design elements of trading systems may give rise to concern, such as cost containment provisions and borrowing and offset provisions.