European Union News

In 2019 and 2022, Europe was captivated by images of farmers in the Netherlands protesting in the streets, blocking traffic with their tractors and angrily warning of impending food shortages.…

This is the third story in a three-part Mongabay miniseries on the Dutch nitrogen crisis and farmer protests of 2022: The Dutch, and European, green agenda crashes into the continent’s…

This is the second story in a three-part Mongabay miniseries on the Dutch nitrogen crisis and farmer protests of 2022: How EU conservation rules shook up Dutch politics. Read Part…

This is the first story in a three-part Mongabay miniseries on the Dutch nitrogen crisis and farmer protests of 2022: How the Dutch food revolution became an ecological time bomb.…

Joseph D’Cruz has more than 20 years of experience in sustainability, having worked for various international organizations like the United Nations Development Programme and the World Economic Forum, on issues…

In 2020, 282 containers full of mixed waste bales sailed from Salerno, Italy, to Sousse, Tunisia, in four shipments. Italian customs did not raise any flags. Customs classified them as…

Balkan countries contain a large number of mostly wild and free-flowing rivers, which are home to impressive biodiversity but which have become threatened by a wave of hydroelectric dam proposals…

A four-day strike by nearly 2,000 Senegalese and Ivory Coast fishers who work on vessels owned by European companies operating in West African waters pulled back the cover on unfair…

EBRO DELTA, Spain — Perched on an oyster and mussel farming platform in the middle of Fangar Bay, Vacile Cotirlet works with the assured movements that come with two decades…

OASI DI CANNEVIÉ, Italy — In the early morning haze, Luca Bellini steered his green boat through the web of canals and lagoons of the Po River Delta. He had…

In mountaineering, it is said, 80 per cent of fatalities happen on the descent. When you reach the summit, you are less than half way to any meaningful measure of…

Six grassroots environmental activists received the Goldman Environmental Prize on April 24. Known as the "Green Nobel Prize," the Goldman Prize honors environmental activists from the six continental regions. The…

Norway is moving forward with plans to mine its continental shelf to procure minerals critical for renewable energy technologies. However, some scientists, members of civil society and even industry leaders…

As bison, lynx and other wildlife return to European forests, conservationists debate whether biodiversity-enhancing reintroductions add to carbon storage and ecosystem resilience against climate change.

Thought to mostly feed on rabbits, researchers accidentally observed Iberian lynx feeding on carrion, a potential food source but also posing a disease risk to the Iberian lynx, which recently saw its numbers rebound.

Revisions to the long-debated European Union Renewable Energy Directive (RED) have been approved. Those policies still support the burning of wood pellets to make energy, despite evidence of harm to forests and climate, say NGOs.

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?…