The acceleration of Europe’s green energy transition is the challenge of the decade. Now it’s time to turn the Green Deal into reality and the European Commission is on it.

With the unveiling of the ‘Fit for 55’ legislative package, the European ‘green’ 20’s have officially started, with the climate package setting out the blueprint for the EU to become the world’s first mover on achieving net zero emissions.

Often touted as a transition fuel, natural gas prices in Europe and the UK have soared to some of the highest levels on record, threatening to raise costs for households and businesses as global supplies of the critical fossil fuel remain tight.

In the UK, prices have risen above 100p a therm, the highest level since 2005 and a record for the summer. In Europe, prices have hit €40 per megawatt hour for the first time.

The Netherlands’ Wastewater Treatment Plants are Resource Factories

More homeowners in Kosovo will be able to invest in domestic energy efficiency improvements as a consequence of a new €5 million credit line the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is extending to Raiffeisen Bank Kosovo. The financing is part of a larger €135 million Green Economy Financing Facility (GEFF) programme for the Western Balkans, which supports energy-efficient solutions to build a greener and sustainable economy. To date, more than 8,000 households in the Western Balkans have improved their energy efficiency through the GEFF programme, with investments in projects that contributed to a reduction of nearly than 12,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year, equivalent to removing 7,270 cars from the street.

The treaty is structured around a fundamental right and a fundamental duty. The first article proposes the first ever binding formulation, at a global level, of the right of “every person […] to live in an ecologically sound environment”.

The Pact is a compass defining a direction by means of converging binding principles. Such principles should be used first and foremost as legal parameters to design policies, both domestic and international, that prevent further environmental harm.

A coalition of investors that manage more than $4 trillion in assets wrote a letter to some of the world’s biggest banks to demand bolder action for addressing climate change and biodiversity decline, including publishing short-term climate-related targets and ending all coal finance by 2040.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), energy efficiency must take a leading role as the “first fuel” in climate-related development assistance in order to achieve the dual objective of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while catalyzing economic development.

Addressing climate change will require a near complete transformation in the ways we generate, distribute, and use energy. To maximize the chances of mitigating the worst impacts of climate change, we must reduce the energy needed to sustain current energy consumption by using it more efficiently.