It began with Angela Merkel. When the former German chancellor opened the borders to refugees in 2015, hundreds of thousands of Syrians and others entered. Many are now settled all over the country.

Put forty people in a room, all with a smartphone in their hand. Ask them to scan a QR code, redirecting to a set of questions like: “How much meat and eggs do you eat?” and “How often do you fly?” They will first start giggling, and speaking to each other to find their answers.

Maguy Soldevila is a former art teacher. Some years ago, she quit the frenzy and the pollution of the French city of Lyon to move into a typical house of the 1960s, in the small village of Sail-sous-Couzan.

Even though people increasingly recognise the plastic pollution threat, we have used more plastic since the covid-19 pandemic began .

Ana, 32, loves going to the movies, is keen on theatre and takes regular yoga lessons. However, during the Covid pandemic she quit the frenzy of Madrid to settle in a remote village in Extremadura , a large Spanish rural area, bordering Portugal.

María Regidor co-owns a mini-hydro power plant in Spain, which produces part of the electricity provided to the residents of the Castile and León region.

Over the last 50 years photons, the particles that make up light, have replaced electrons to transfer data in communication networks.

In the southern Belgian province of Namur, concrete and bricks from demolished buildings are being turned into eco-friendly road surfaces.

Wind and solar energy is not constant and therefore a renewables-based society requires smart grids to transport this power from areas where electricity generation is currently high to those where it is low in order to meet demand.

Biomimicry , also called bionics, uses structures found in nature to solve everyday problems. A well-known example is the Velcro strip , which a Swiss engineer, Georges de Mestral copied from the burdocks that stuck to his dog and clothes on a walk through the fields.

For most of us, any concerns about computing speed or data storage are usually to make it go faster while storing more. We hardly ever think about the enormous amounts of energy already required to power Internet servers or charge the increasing number of devices we own.

In the early 1990s, a series of initiatives were set about fighting organised crime on a European level. However, the killing of “ndrangheta” members in the German city of Duisburg in 2007 acted as a wake-up call.

More than the 70 percent of the protein sources required by animals bred in the European Union are imported from non-EU countries . Soybean dominates the protein supply for animal feed .

The  Paris climate change pact , which  entered into force  last year, was announced with a huge fanfare. The deal aims to limit the rise in average global temperatures to “well below” two degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels.

In our fast-moving world, biotech is at the forefront of developments – but, by its very nature, it can provoke ethical and moral concerns .

It’s not always easy to see the wood from trees when dealing with complex challenges in energy policy. However, Europe is increasingly finding in its forests a significant source of renewable energy that could help the region move away from fossil fuel dependency.

If aliens were to examine a human, they would think we were just slavish organisms designed to feed microbes and carry them around. Our bodies contain ten times more bacteria than cells , and there are an estimated 3.

It's a brand new sector: the first steps date back to 2012. Today energy crowdfunding is a way of financing solar panel or wind turbine projects.

From thatched roofing in cold regions to reflective walls in hotter climates, for centuries buildings have been constructed with materials that maximize comfort within a given environment.

Cities have started to join forces to become more energy efficient . This trends stems from the findings of the first climate assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in 1990, which was quite alarming.