Accessibility can improve everyone’s lives
In a digitalised world, accessibility is ever more at a premium for the visually impaired—who should be involved in finding solutions.
Society
Analysis and debate on work and welfare, social rights, migration, gender, climate and the future of European societies.
Killing Twitter
Elon Musk claims he bought the platform to ‘help humanity’ by investing in a public good—the world’s digital town square. But the people, not the pavement, make the town square.
Injustice is fuelling Europe’s energy crisis
Europe needs to shift from a system locked into climate-wrecking fuels, extractivism and autocracies—towards ‘energy justice’.
Europe’s 2050 mission to a future-fit economy
Lydia Korinek and Jakob Hafele
The step up to a sustainable economy is steep, but it is achievable with political leadership and unshackled public investment.
European Child Guarantee: making it a reality
Bruno Ribeiro Barata, Ally Dunhill and Enrico Paolo Tormen
Portugal, whose national plan is launched today, offers a model for a transversal and localised approach.
Progress and setbacks from COP27
Patrick ten Brink, Luke Haywood, Katy Wiese and Alberto Vela
The European Union cannot rely on the United Nations process to deliver and must reinforce its own climate efforts.
Energy bills: direct payments needed, not fossil subsidies
Subsidising high energy costs might seem the obvious answer to the cost-of-living crisis—but it’s not.
The most wonderful time of the year
The splurge of Christmas consumerism, especially in Britain, Kate Pickett writes, is partly driven by status anxiety.
Now is the future for social security
In a Europe of increasingly non-standard employment, social protection for all is more rather than less imperative.
The entrepreneurial state must lead on climate change
As a much-touted green alliance of financial institutions crumbles, the private sector has once again proved unequal to the task of climate leadership.
A European initiative for a global green deal
COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh is now open but the European Union does not seem to have the will to achieve serious goals.
Global environmental governance: reform urgent
As COP27 opens in Egypt while famine sweeps Somalia, an outcome-based approach to climate change must replace the appearance of action.
Shrink finance, save the planet
Magdalena Senn and Jorim Gerrard
It will take more than sustainable-finance rules to summon the investment required for the socio-ecological transformation.
Does the European Care Strategy care about disability?
The European Commission’s initiative on long-term care addresses disability yet ignores key aspects of international law.
Getting out of the coal black hole
Europe can replace all Russian fossil-fuel imports with clean solutions by 2025—but only if it avoids the coal trap.
From ‘green growth’ to a ‘good life’
Nora Räthzel and Valeria Pulignano
The Green Deal assumes economic growth can be ‘decoupled’ from ecological damage. That’s wishful thinking.