Climate Change and Environment

One of the key challenges we face today is how society should tackle climate change and mitigate the impacts of global warming. The EU-funded ENGAGE project has gathered key stakeholders to produce a new generation of global and national decarbonisation pathways.

Researchers compared the performance and fatigue of flexible subsea cables. They found that using a device called a bend stiffener greatly increases their lifespan by protecting them against damage and fatigue.

What will Europe’s first seagoing ferry powered by hydrogen fuel cells look like? The EU-funded HySeas III project has released the first images as testing progresses on the ship’s key components.

An international consortium has completed the design of a single-point mooring (SPM) system platform for floating wind turbines.

The plight of honeybees has captured the public’s imagination, but the reality is that many wild pollinators are in decline. Wild bees, butterflies, beetles, flies and other insects play an important role in ecosystems but are under pressure from habitat loss, pesticides and climate change.

Researchers grow glasswort and grey mullet together for the first time in an aquaponics experiment, and study the growth of greater amberjack reared in sea cages, all under one EU-funded project.

A new study shows a link between the windborne iron aerosols from Australia’s 2019-2020 wildfires deposited in the Southern Ocean and the massive algal blooms observed there, raising new questions about oceanic carbon uptake.

An EU-backed team is developing an innovative photonics sensor for fast and reliable food safety monitoring in Europe’s fruit and vegetable production and distribution chains.

A new study explores the climate and air quality benefits of removing methane from the atmosphere – a crucial complementary approach to current CO2 emissions reduction efforts.

Meet two of this year’s best EU-funded innovators: Finnish company MetGen, the overall Grand Prix winner, and C2CA Technology, the Netherlands, winner of the Sustainability Tech category.

For the first time, scientists have produced a stable 2D silicon compound, paving the way for new uses of silicon in molecular chemistry.

Their pioneering work in complex physical systems has earned German climate modeller Klaus Hasselmann and Italian theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi the prestigious Nobel Prize in Physics, which they share with US-based climatologist Syukuro Manabe.

A new study published in ‘Nature Climate Change’ and supported by the EU-funded TiPES project has highlighted how the Atlantic current system – of which the Gulf Stream is a part – appears to be showing clear signs of instability and potential collapse. If this happened, it would have a major cooling effect on Europe’s climate.

An EU-funded team’s novel precision aquaculture technology helps farmers predict water quality events that could affect mussel and oyster culture and lead to site closures.

A hybrid concrete-plastic floating platform and its components have been validated for offshore wind energy use.

Residents in the Portuguese city of Porto get help making their own compost, and urban metabolism is analysed as an important tool in transitioning to a circular economy.

Tests reveal positive leaching results for aluminium and calcium from anorthosite, pointing to the rock as a key solution to sustainable aluminium production.

Researchers have taken the characteristic that’s usually an obstacle to the design of lightweight, reliable steel structures and turned it into a mechanism that makes the metal more resistant to hydrogen-induced cracking.

Current forecasting methods underestimate technological progress in energy technologies, predicting higher costs than actually observed, a new study reports.

Researchers estimate that actions to limit global warming to well below 2 °C would boost energy sector employment from 18 to 26 million by 2050.