Wherever fires occur, they strongly affect the air we breathe. They even affect the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale.

Poor air quality costs Europe more than €700 million per year, in health expenditures and loss of economic performance, according to official EU sources.

You may think that climate change is being caused by burning oil, coal and gas. But not so fast! The emission of methane from cattle is a surprisingly important factor .

Air quality is not a local problem. Like clouds moving through the sky, pollution is transported from one location to another by wind patterns in the atmosphere .

Europe’s bathing water has come a long way in the last few decades. Especially since the EU Bathing Water Directive in 1976, countries have worked to eliminate sewage contamination in the waters we swim or paddle in.

What happens to research findings once the researchers have gone away? A web site run from the University of Stuttgart in Germany offers scientists an opportunity to bring their own data from completed research project on environmental and health risks and contribute to an Integrated Environmental Health Impact Assessment System, dubbed IEHIAS .

Going green is one of the fastest growing trends, particularly in industry. But smaller size companies are often left wondering how best to become more environmentally friendly .

The European fashion industry is a huge consumer of fresh water. Estimates point to 600 million cubic meter of fresh water being consumed yearly in Europe by the textile and clothing industry ; not a negligible amount.

Energy efficiency has become a key objective in the current context of increasing energy demand, decreasing resources and global warming. Key to efficient energy savings, however, are users' awareness and behaviour.

The European Commission, on 29 th April 2013, slapped a two-year ban on insecticides suspected of killing off bee colonies. This follows the European Food Safety Authority finding that they pose a high acute risk to honey bees.

The amount of nitrogen that is excreted by livestock is directly proportional to the amount it is fed . This is according to Chris Reynolds a researcher in nutritional physiology of ruminants  at  the University of Reading , UK.

Dealing with sludge is one of the biggest issues of waste water treatment.

We are used to the idea of vulnerable environments and species. We are also familiar with cultural vulnerability. For example when traditional peoples meet seductive modern ways of life.

Natural sensory system such as bacteria engineered to detect pollution and placed in a self-contained portable box could be the most effective way to track pollutants .

Scientists keep producing increasingly complex modelling tools to evaluate urgently needed mitigating strategies of our carbon footprint .  However, it is policy makers who have to decide on measures to curb our CO2 emissions.

Eco-symbiosis is en vogue. Indeed, this approach consists in using waste from one industry as raw material for another. It appears like an ideal solution for one of the most challenging type of pollution: oil spills .

Imagine that a hundred years ago it was possible to take the ‘digital fingerprint’ of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and store it in an international database.

New air pollutant emission targets have just been introduced in the EU. Chance of meeting these new targets has recently been tremendously improved by considerable progress on how emissions from different sources are measured and estimated.

As the COP26 United Nations climate change conference prepares to meet in Glasgow in November, there is an urgency to build on the aims of the 2015 Paris agreement to limit global warming.

The coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating effect on Europe over the last 18 months, with a death toll fast approaching 1 million people and lockdowns that have hit businesses and economies across the region.