Unione europea

While images of the latest disaster linked to extreme weather events flow around the world from Valencia, one report has gone almost unnoticed.It's called State of Soils in Europe 2024 and is the result of joint research by the Joint Research Center (JRC) and the European Environment Agency (EEA).The report shows how land degradation continues unabated across Europe.Due to various factors – such as intensive agriculture, monocultures and the use of nutrients that aim exclusively to increase productivity without regenerating the land – the continental soil is increasingly impoverished and impermeable.Yet, the two issues are closely related:if it is true that extreme events such as floods are increasing in frequency due to climate change (3 to 5 times more than half a century ago, according to statistics), the tragic implications in terms of victims and the destruction they cause could be significantly reduced through mitigation strategies.Among these, maintaining the soil's...

Over 260 thousand citizens of the European Union have signed a petition addressed to the European Commission, expressly asking the EU executive to give political priority to reducing the use of pesticides.The petition, the result of a growing movement in favor of environmental sustainability, was supported by numerous environmental organizations and associations active in the sector of environmental protection and agriculture, but also by many public health experts and biologists.There are three fundamental objectives at the center of the instance:reintroducing pesticide reduction into EU policy, reinstating ambitious targets for sustainable food production systems and protecting public health and the environment.The fight against the massive use of pesticides is therefore reinvigorated, an increasingly crucial aspect for the protection of the ecosystem and public health, put at risk by an intensive agricultural model considered, on a large scale, no longer sustainable in the long term...

COP29 (the United Nations Conference on Climate Change currently underway in Baku, Azerbaijan) is becoming the perfect stage for the European Union to redefine Azerbaijani fossil fuels as "sustainable" and "low-emission".In this way, while on the one hand it publicly proclaims its gradual reduction of dependence on fossil fuels, on the other the EU leads the expansion of Azerbaijani gas, in order to guarantee internal energy security after the cut in Russian gas supplies – it matters little if with resources that come from a country where serious violations of human rights are taking place. Ilham Aliyev's Azerbaijan is one of the fossil energy producers that could constitute a ideal partner for the EU, after it decided to replace low-cost Russian fossil fuels with those from other countries.The State has in fact announced its intention to increase its fossil production by a third in the next decade, also thanks to the growing need of European countries.The Cor...