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.

“If I just look at my courtyard , three of my neighbors have an electric car" , says Christian Patermann, long-time program director at the European Commission and now internationally known as the “father of the bioeconomy”.

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.

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.

In his song ‘ Concrete Jungle ’, the reggae legend Bob Marley sang wistfully about being trapped in a dense and oppressive urban environment ‘where the living is hardest’, all the while longing for the ‘sweet life’.

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.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms allow energy sharing and trading within a community without the binding mediation of the traditional big utilities.

Willingly or forced by circumstances, cities across Europe have slowly started to change their vision about urban mobility.

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.

“Are we all on the same page? Singing from the same hymn sheet?” For anyone working with groups of people in policy areas, the answer is nearly always “yes”.

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 .

For David Bollier, cities are at a crossroads. As smart city initiatives and data collection increases, it’s essential that citizens use the ideas of the commons to retain control of the services that matter to them, and to ensure these work for the people of the city, not just for business or bureaucracy, he argues.

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.

Over recent decades, research on innovative food processing technologies has been carried out to identify ways to combat pathogens while reducing the need for chemical preservatives and improving the nutritional properties of the food at the same time.

The European construction industry and home-builder citizens are increasingly aware of sustainable choices. Some solutions can be more expensive than others, although sometimes this only concerns the construction phase.

In January 2005, a severe storm swept across Northern Europe, from Ireland to Russia. More than 500,000 homes were left without power, with Denmark and Southern Sweden being particularly hard-hit.

Not only a crafty deception to provide tasty food for astronauts. Over the next years 3D printers may become a household kitchen appliance, helping people save time when preparing meals or adding specific nutritious ingredients to their diet.

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.

There is much need to develop energy efficient solutions for residential buildings in Europe. The EU-funded project, MeeFS , due to be completed by the end of 2015, is developing an innovative multifunctional and energy efficient façade system to retrofit residential buildings.