Main Studies

The Price of Doing Too Little Too Late

Our financial system has gone through a variety of bubbles. The real estate bubble, the commodity bub- ble, the dot-com bubble. A potential new one is emerging: the carbon bubble. With this study, we want to follow the money trail behind the carbon bubble and analyse the resilience of our financial system against a possible carbon shock. For this purpose, the study has investigated the exposure in high-carbon assets of 43 of the EU’s largest banks and pension funds and calculated their potential losses under a variety of scenarios.  

IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE ON ALL EUROPEAN ISLANDS

The Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament published a study done by the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP) to try and get a better picture of the impacts of climate change in all European Islands. Europe does indeed counts a large numbers of Islands, spread all across the globe. The aim of the study was to understand the real, concrete risks those parts of specific territories face, evaluate the costs of inaction in key areas (such as security, migration, biodiversity etc) and how this impacts the continental Europe.  

Flawed Reactor Pressure Vessels in Belgian Nuclear Plants Doel-3 and Tihange-2

In the frame of inspections performed complementary to regular inspections in June 2012 at Doel 3 to detect and characterize underclad defects in the whole cylindrical part of the RPV, unexpected flaws were detected in the forged rings of the reactor core (SA-508-cl.3). The flaws were found in the base metal in areas away from the welds. In the core lower shell a total of 7,776 indications were found, in the core upper shell 931 indications. Similar flaws were revealed in September 2012 in the reactor pressure vessel of the nuclear power plant Tihange 2: in the upper core shell 1,931 indications, in the lower core shell 80 indications. In the transition ring no indications have been reported, in the flange 19 indications have been identified.  

The True Costs of Automobility

The report analyses the external costs of car use within the EU-27 by evaluating the existing literature in the field and developing a database from these figures. No own field research has been carried out for the preparation of this report; all input data has been published and discussed previously.