The climate and energy policy faces a major challenge to limit climate change, to secure energy supplies by increased energy demand and at the same time to get out from the nuclear power technology. These parallel tasks must be solved by the European climate and energy policy. In particular, the...

Energy poverty, characterized by a lack of access to reliable and affordable energy services, persists to be a critical global challenge with far-reaching socio-economic implications. As this also remains to be an urgent issue in the EU, measures alleviating energy poverty are critical to ensure...

The European Council has proposed to stick to a more ambitious GHG target but to scrap a binding RES target for the post-2020 period. This is in line with many existing assessments which demonstrate that additional RES policies impair the cost-effectiveness of addressing a single CO2...

The extraction and processing of unconventional oil is more energy intensive and has larger negative environmental impacts than the extraction of conventional oil. The European Union (EU) estimates that oil sands lead to 22% more emissions than conventional oil. The EU is very concerned by the...

Two major international frameworks provide landmarks for future development paths: the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement. Monitoring the progress towards achieving the individual goals has to consider a multitude of synergies and trade-offs. In this paper we...