European Union News

This story was produced with funding support from the Pulitzer Center. MAZZORBO, Italy — In the kitchen of a Michelin-starred restaurant, a dozen blue crabs await their fate in a…

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — A misty rain blows against my face as I follow Farah Obaidullah along Scheveningen Beach in the northwest part of The Hague. Despite the wind and…

Last year, farmer protests erupted throughout the Netherlands, riding a wave of rural anger at government plans to drastically halve nitrogen emissions by downsizing and closing farms. This quickly swept…

Growing up in Gällivare/ Váhtjer, a Swedish village in Sápmi, north of the Arctic Circle, the threats facing Sámi people were a daily reality. We are Europe’s only Indigenous people,…

As biomass burning to make energy surges, nations are setting standards that fail to count carbon emissions at power plant smokestacks, worsening climate change even as those same countries dub biomass “carbon neutral.”

Seemingly contrary to French President Macron’s green image, France is asking for an EU policy exemption to make biomass energy for Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana — resulting in the clearing and burning of rainforest.

Before Ukrainian biologist Mikhail Rusin can grab his shovel and venture afield, he first needs to ask locals if there are land mines nearby in one of the few areas…

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has welcomed a recent decision by fisheries regulators to curtail the use of controversial fish-aggregating devices, or FADs, which critics blame for a steep decline…

At the start of last month’s UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal, UN Environmental Programme Executive Director, Inger Andersen, made the memorable statement, “we are at war with nature” and…

Last July, as the Ukraine war raged, the EU barred all Russian woody biomass imports; even as South Korea took in Russia’s supply. Illicit woody biomass may also still be flowing to the EU from Turkey, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Each year, the European Union imports an estimated 4,000 metric tons of frogs’ legs. That sum is the equivalent of around 200 million frogs killed to feed demand, the majority…

A stone causeway connects an islet, the famed Aragonese Castle perched atop it, to the island of Ischia off the coast of Naples in southern Italy. Below water, along the…

An existing regulation designating the burning of forests to make energy as being renewable has been reversed in Australia. That decision seems unlikely to alter the EU’s heavy commitment to biomass burning.

We all send our recycling somewhere for proper handling, but the operation of one such handling center in Poland makes one ask, is it being done right, or at all?…

The U.K. styles itself as a leader on environmental concerns, but when it comes to dealing with waste, it's got a ways to go in tackling the mountains of rubbish…

Policymakers could finalize revisions to the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive by year end, even as forest activists offer new evidence denouncing wood pellets as an energy source, and calling for an end to subsidies.

JAKARTA — The European Union has finalized a law that will ban the trade of commodities associated with deforestation and forest degradation. On Dec. 6, the European Council, Parliament and Commission struck…

England is facing a waste crisis, and not one you've likely heard of: the clandestine dumping of household and business waste, even dead animals, in the countryside. So-called 'fly-tipping' happens…

The prospect of a European winter energy crisis loomed from the moment Russia launched its assault on Ukraine in February. In the following weeks, the EU – which in 2021…

The Mediterranean Sea isn’t the source of plenty it once was. It now contains some of the most ecologically degraded marine areas in the world, and has been the site…

BERLIN — Indonesian officials have slammed the European Union’s proposal of a regulation that they say negates more than a decade of progress by the Southeast Asian country to comply…

The European Union is considering a regulation on deforestation-free products that is one of the most promising environmental legislative initiatives of this decade. It would force traders in commodities that…

"It might be the highest density of trout species on Earth," says podcast guest Ulrich Eichelmann of Balkan countries' riverine legacy, which has become threatened by a tsunami of hydroelectric…

BRUSSELS — On Sept. 15, the European Commission made a historic announcement: it will prohibit bottom fishing across 16,000 square kilometers, or 6,200 square miles — an area about half…

While forest advocates had high hopes, the EU parliament voted this week not to declassify woody biomass as a renewable energy source, paving the way for more EU, U.S., and Canadian forests to be turned into wood pellets and burned.

Proponents of Swiss biomass are subject to an “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome,” expecting the public to believe in many impossible things, including that burning forest biomass is carbon neutral, sustainable and clean, critics say.

Travelling by train from central London, it doesn’t take long before the city gives way to a patchwork of mostly agricultural fields. But one of these fields is special. The…

Over a decade ago I traveled around Sweden to view its forestry practices – the country has a gigantic forest products industry that largely transforms trees into paper products and…

ISANGI, Congo — In a secluded corner of the Congo, machetes in hand, scientists make their way through the Yangambi Man and Biosphere Reserve, using shallow streams as natural paths…

Seven grassroots environmental activists will receive the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize today, on May 25. Known as the Green Nobel Prize, the Goldman Prize honors environmental activists from each of…