Activists fighting plans to build over 300 hydropower plants in Bosnia and Herzegovina have painted a giant mural of a woman smashing an old, broken dam on the Bašćica River.
Center for Environment/Friends of the Earth Bosnia & Herzegovina – part of the Coalition for the Protection of Rivers in Bosnia & Herzegovina, the group behind the 15 metre high installation – is calling for dam building to stop and for development to be focused on tourism and job-producing traditional activities.
Our director, Magda Stoczkiewicz, stepped down last month after ten years at the helm of our European network. We caught up with her in her last week at work to talk about her reflections on her time with us and the broader environmental movement, and her advice on how to tackle the challenges we're facing today.
Up for discussion: happy memories of flooding the streets of Copenhagen with activists at COP15, the delicate matter of protesting in Paris at the COP21 weeks after the 2015 attacks, how the network has strengthened over the years, and what's next for the EU and Europe.
Today, Bulgaria's President Rumen Radev has referred to the Constitutional Court a request for a mandatory interpretation of the provisions of the Constitution concerning the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the European Union and its Member States (CETA).
South America is paying the price for Europe's hungry factory farms – with vast monocultures of pesticide-soaked, GM soy where forests used to be. But a new EU proposal aims to boost the amount of soy grown in Europe to ease the pressure on countries in the Global South. At the same time, it must be careful to avoid repeating the problem in Europe, argues Stanka Becheva.
A legal complaint submitted today to the European Commission by campaign groups [1] alleges that the construction of a controversial EU-funded motorway is already breaking EU nature laws, and warns that completing the final section through Kresna Gorge nature reserve in Bulgaria would be catastrophic for protected animals and plants in the region.
This episode looks at feminism and how it relates to our work for environmental justice.
In the coming days and weeks, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker will decide whether to close Europe's fields to genetically modified (GM) crops for good, or if more GM crops can be grown.
National governments have over the past decade failed to reach a consensus of whether to allow new GM crops to be grown or not. Most countries reject the crops, but under EU procedures they have insufficient numbers to ban them outright.
Because of this stalemate the final decision now lies with President Juncker.
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More than seven months after EU Member States were scheduled to start the process of slashing the use of plastic bags through the Plastic Bags Directive, Friends of the Earth Europe and 17 other environmental NGOs join Surfrider and Zero Waste Europe to mark the 8th International Plastic Bag Free Day. In this important year where plastic pollution of ocean is considered a priority global concern, the compliance and ambition levels of EU Member States to reduce plastic bags fall short of expectations.
Reacting to the official notification by Bayer to the European Commission of their planned acquisition of Monsanto, Adrian Bebb, food and farming campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe said:
"This merger would be a marriage made in hell. Bayer and Monsanto already wield enormous power over our food and farming system, and their joining forces would be bad news for citizens, farmers and the environment.