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Car use and car-dependent lifestyles in the European Union (EU) are contributing to the rubber boom in the tropics due to tyre use. By focusing the transition towards sustainable mobility patterns on the reduction of carbon emissions, the EU is missing opportunities to prevent other environmental impacts. This is particularly true for environmental impacts occurring at distant places where the impacts are actually felt, such as the degradation of tropical ecosystems. Progress toward sustainable mobility in the EU requires cross-cutting policies that enable Europeans to live car-free. ; COUPLED Policy Briefs feature highlights and policy implications from research conducted under the project Operationalising Telecouplings for Solving Sustainability Challenges for Land Use (COUPLED). COUPLED is a European research and training network that works on topics such as land use processes that link distant places (telecouplings) and how to govern these processes towards sustainability in an interconnected world. This project receives funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 765408. Responsibility for the content rests entirely with the authors. Neither the COUPLED network nor the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research Executive Agency (REA) necessarily share the expressed views.

THE SUCCESSFUL CONCLUSION OF THE EU/ACP NEGOTIATIONS OVER A SUCCESSOR TO THE LOME IV CONVENTION IS A TIMELY ANTIDOTE TO SEATTLE AND A MODEL OF FUTURE NORTH/SOUTH RELATIONS. THE NEW TREATY IS TO LAST 2O YEARS. REGIONAL INTEGRATION IS TO BE A FEATURE OF THE NEW RELATIONSHIP. AGREEMENT TO INTRODUCE GOOD GOVERNANCE AS A FUNDAMENTAL ELECTION CONTINUES.

AbstractThe workplace has been hailed as a fruitful context for encountering difference, but other institutions of adult life — notably the church — have been downplayed, as it has been argued that self-selection produces political homogeneity within these environments. At the same time, much of what scholars know about social influence has been based on relatively blunt measures of disagreement, typically included in surveys conducted over multiple-week spans either before or after the actual voting has taken place. Inspired by work on the survival, loci, and democratic consequences of political disagreement, we survey voters at the moment when the literature would suggest they should be most likely to report agreement: Election Day. Wedding exit poll methodology with items that capture the major dimensions of networks and the content of discussion, we re-examine the contexts in which discussions take place and untangle issue-specific patterns of disagreement. We find evidence that church-based networks fulfill important democratic roles relative to other contexts, exposing individuals to cross-cutting discourse while serving as unique sources of information in the midst of broader electoral environments.

Critics of European Union (EU) enlargement claim that new members could pose a serious challenge to the existing institutional balances within the EU and endanger future institutional deepening. Together with various enlargements since its inception in 1958, the EU has gone through numerous institutional changes that increasingly reflect its supranational character, although the European Community still contains intergovernmental elements. The most important dimension, which has evolved in this evolutionary process of the EU institutions, is the fine balance between small and large member states in terms of representation and power distribution. This is reflected, for example, in the European Commission, where the ten (relatively) small states are apportioned one commissioner and the remaining five large states two commissioners each.

The link between political Europe and Europeans is a question. Whether formulated in terms of identity, electoral participation, opinion or public space, debates always question the legitimacy of the EU. Not the legal or constitutional legitimacy which refers to the principles of democratic theory, even though that debate existed, but rather political legitimacy. That conferred by popular support and which sits in the ballot boxes and opinion polls. According to a widely accepted chronology, the problem of the political legitimacy of the EU would have emerged as such at the beginning of the 1990s. This article is intended to show that if there is a "problem", it goes back to the origins of European integration and is not unrelated to the political tensions in the Community. ; Le lien entre l'Europe politique et les Européens fait question. Qu'ils soient formulés en termes d'identité, de participation électorale, d'opinion ou d'espace publics, les débats interrogent toujours la légitimité de l'UE. Non pas la légitimité juridique ou constitutionnelle qui réfère aux principes de la théorie démocratique, encore que ce débat-là ait existé , mais bien plutôt la légitimité politique. Celle conférée par le soutien populaire et qui s'éprouve dans les urnes et les sondages d'opinion. Selon une chronologie largement admise, le problème de la légitimité politique de l'UE se serait constitué comme tel au début de la décennie 1990. Cet article entend montrer que si il y a "problème", celui-ci, d'une part, remonte aux origines de la construction européenne et, d'autre part, n'est pas sans lien avec les tensions politiques qui traversent les milieux communautaires.

Published online: 30 June 2016 ; This article investigates the link between attitude formation at the national and the supranational level of the European Union (EU). While the existing studies have provided strong evidence that attitudes towards national institutions fundamentally condition attitudes towards the EU, the mechanisms through which these spillovers occur are not clearly spelled out. Our main contribution is to theorize the complex ways in which the national politicization of the European integration process affects support for the EU by focusing on critical moments in the EU integration process and the electoral fortunes of the political parties doing the cuing. To test our theoretical claims, we employ multilevel models using six rounds of the European Social Survey combined with party-level data from Chapel Hill Expert Survey, and various country-level data. The analyses show that spillover effects are crucially conditioned by the level of politicization of European integration at the national level. ; ERC POLCON project funded.

Over the past 50 years, the European Union (EU) has dramatically increased its policy-making power. However, there remains considerable variation over time as well as across policy areas in the relative power of the EU and the member states. The variation is likely to influence EU-wide bargaining. Following the logic of bargaining games with domestically constrained actors, or two-level games, the changes in the bargaining environment may also influence party competition within the member states of the European Union. Using manifesto data for 1951–2001, this article examines convergence of party programmes across Western Europe. It is shown that European integration has increasingly constrained the range of policy platforms. Moreover, we generally find a stronger effect if and when countries are actually members of the EU. European integration bolsters programmatic convergence of Euro-friendly as well as Eurosceptic parties. However, European integration particularly influences the convergence of Eurosceptic parties in EU member states.

Reliable quantification of the sources and sinks of greenhouse gases, together with trends and uncertainties, is essential to monitoring the progress in mitigating anthropogenic emissions under the Paris Agreement. This study provides a consolidated synthesis of CH4 and N2O emissions with consistently derived state-of-the-art bottom-up (BU) and top-down (TD) data sources for the European Union and UK (EU27 + UK). We integrate recent emission inventory data, ecosystem process-based model results and inverse modeling estimates over the period 1990-2017. BU and TD products are compared with European national greenhouse gas inventories (NGHGIs) reported to the UN climate convention UNFCCC secretariat in 2019. For uncertainties, we used for NGHGIs the standard deviation obtained by varying parameters of inventory calculations, reported by the member states (MSs) following the recommendations of the IPCC Guidelines. For atmospheric inversion models (TD) or other inventory datasets (BU), we defined uncertainties from the spread between different model estimates or model-specific uncertainties when reported. In comparing NGHGIs with other approaches, a key source of bias is the activities included, e.g., anthropogenic versus anthropogenic plus natural fluxes. In inversions, the separation between anthropogenic and natural emissions is sensitive to the geospatial prior distribution of emissions. Over the 2011-2015 period, which is the common denominator of data availability between all sources, the anthropogenic BU approaches are directly comparable, reporting mean emissions of 20.8 Tg CH4 yr-1 (EDGAR v5.0) and 19.0 Tg CH4 yr-1 (GAINS), consistent with the NGHGI estimates of 18.9 ± 1.7 Tg CH4 yr-1. The estimates of TD total inversions give higher emission estimates, as they also include natural emissions. Over the same period regional TD inversions with higher-resolution atmospheric transport models give a mean emission of 28.8 Tg CH4 yr-1. Coarser-resolution global TD inversions are consistent with regional TD inversions, for global inversions with GOSAT satellite data (23.3 Tg CH4 yr-1) and surface network (24.4 Tg CH4 yr-1). The magnitude of natural peatland emissions from the JSBACH-HIMMELI model, natural rivers and lakes emissions, and geological sources together account for the gap between NGHGIs and inversions and account for 5.2 Tg CH4 yr-1. For N2O emissions, over the 2011-2015 period, both BU approaches (EDGAR v5.0 and GAINS) give a mean value of anthropogenic emissions of 0.8 and 0.9 Tg N2O yr-1, respectively, agreeing with the NGHGI data (0.9 ± 0.6 Tg N2O yr-1). Over the same period, the average of the three total TD global and regional inversions was 1.3 ± 0.4 and 1.3 ± 0.1 Tg N2O yr-1, respectively. The TD and BU comparison method defined in this study can be operationalized for future yearly updates for the calculation of CH4 and N2O budgets both at the EU+UK scale and at the national scale. The referenced datasets related to figures are visualized at. (Petrescu et al., 2020b).

Reliable quantification of the sources and sinks of greenhouse gases, together with trends and uncertainties, is essential to monitoring the progress in mitigating anthropogenic emissions under the Paris Agreement. This study provides a consolidated synthesis of CH4 and N2O emissions with consistently derived state-of-the-art bottom-up (BU) and top-down (TD) data sources for the European Union and UK (EU27 + UK). We integrate recent emission inventory data, ecosystem process-based model results and inverse modeling estimates over the period 1990-2017. BU and TD products are compared with European national greenhouse gas inventories (NGHGIs) reported to the UN climate convention UNFCCC secretariat in 2019. For uncertainties, we used for NGHGIs the standard deviation obtained by varying parameters of inventory calculations, reported by the member states (MSs) following the recommendations of the IPCC Guidelines. For atmospheric inversion models (TD) or other inventory datasets (BU), we defined uncertainties from the spread between different model estimates or model-specific uncertainties when reported. In comparing NGHGIs with other approaches, a key source of bias is the activities included, e.g., anthropogenic versus anthropogenic plus natural fluxes. In inversions, the separation between anthropogenic and natural emissions is sensitive to the geospatial prior distribution of emissions. Over the 2011-2015 period, which is the common denominator of data availability between all sources, the anthropogenic BU approaches are directly comparable, reporting mean emissions of 20.8 Tg CH4 yr-1 (EDGAR v5.0) and 19.0 Tg CH4 yr-1 (GAINS), consistent with the NGHGI estimates of 18.9 ± 1.7 Tg CH4 yr-1. The estimates of TD total inversions give higher emission estimates, as they also include natural emissions. Over the same period regional TD inversions with higher-resolution atmospheric transport models give a mean emission of 28.8 Tg CH4 yr-1. Coarser-resolution global TD inversions are consistent with regional TD inversions, for global inversions with GOSAT satellite data (23.3 Tg CH4 yr-1) and surface network (24.4 Tg CH4 yr-1). The magnitude of natural peatland emissions from the JSBACH-HIMMELI model, natural rivers and lakes emissions, and geological sources together account for the gap between NGHGIs and inversions and account for 5.2 Tg CH4 yr-1. For N2O emissions, over the 2011-2015 period, both BU approaches (EDGAR v5.0 and GAINS) give a mean value of anthropogenic emissions of 0.8 and 0.9 Tg N2O yr-1, respectively, agreeing with the NGHGI data (0.9 ± 0.6 Tg N2O yr-1). Over the same period, the average of the three total TD global and regional inversions was 1.3 ± 0.4 and 1.3 ± 0.1 Tg N2O yr-1, respectively. The TD and BU comparison method defined in this study can be operationalized for future yearly updates for the calculation of CH4 and N2O budgets both at the EU+UK scale and at the national scale. The referenced datasets related to figures are visualized at. (Petrescu et al., 2020b).