Headline: News

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Europe needs to integrate its efforts to combat air pollution and climate change. This will yield benefits for mitigating climate change, and also for public health and agricultural production. Joining a high-level panel with EU Commissioners Janez Potočnik and Connie Hedegaard and the Swedish Minister of the Environment Lena Ek, IASS Scientific Director Mark Lawrence exemplified this with the case of Short-Lived Climate-forcing Pollutants (SLCPs) at the conference “CLEAN AIR EVERYWHERE: Blowing the winds of change into European air policy”.

<p>The German energy transition is followed with great interest also in the Nordic countries. At a conference “The Energiewende – is there a Nordic Way?”, organized by the IASS and the Nordic Embassies in Berlin, high-level participants from Germany and the Nordic countries debated the political, economic, technical and social aspects of a sustainable energy future.</p>

<p>What transformations of the global financial system are required to ensure a sustainable development of humankind within planetary boundaries? The Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam has started an investigation of this question. To support this inquiry, it teams up with the European research network <a>Global Systems Dynamics and Policy</a>, coordinated by the <a>Global Climate Forum</a>.</p>

<p>A new book of the IASS sheds light on the perspectives of sustainable development. The book, published by the German publishing house Metropolis Verlag, originates from a workshop at the IASS and is edited by <a href="/node/556">Judith Enders </a>and <a href="/node/71">Moritz Remig</a>.  An English translation of the book is in preparation and will appear in 2013.</p>

<p>The Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies has become an official non-state partner of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC). The CCAC was launched in February 2012 in order to draw attention to “short-lived climate forcing pollutants” (SLCPs), including gases like ozone and methane and particles like soot, and to help curb their emissions. Not only are these pollutants harmful to human health, agriculture and ecosystems, but they also play a large role in climate change - at present, their combined role is nearly as large as carbon dioxide.</p>