Amidst other national and global climate protection initiatives, the new EU Commission under the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen is facing the challenge of concretely following through on previous announcements regarding an ambitious climate policy. Specifically, action must be taken to raise...

The construction of a second Baltic Sea natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany (Nord Stream 2) is very controversial for political, energy economic, and ecological reasons. The project owner and some European energy companies argue that it is a profitable, private-sector investment project...

The COP27 (United Nations Climate Change Conference) in November 2022 once again highlighted the fact that countries are starting from different positions when it comes to emissions and climate policy. This Weekly Report classifies countries into representative profiles based on their past,...

Large parts of the existing natural gas distribution networks must be decommissioned due to the decarbonization of the heat supply. However, there are neither regulatory nor economic incentives for the gas network operators to do so and delaying the decommissioning could be expensive for the...

Yearly revenues from transnational criminal activity account for USD 1 to 1.6 trillion, and a wide variety of methods is employed to transfer those revenues across borders and launder it. The specific type of crime largely determines the choice of methods. Terrorists, for example, use both...

The terrorist threat has increased in importance over the last decade and Western governments have implemented a multitude of measures to address it. Their numbers and the significant financial cost they involve have, however, not been matched with an adequate evaluation of effectiveness. We can...

In this Policy Briefing, we review the available terrorism databases by focusing on their characteristics, advantages and disadvantages. This serves as a guide for policymakers and academic researchers alike. The rapid and accelerating development of security economics has generated great demand...

In this Policy Briefing we look at authorities' relative counterterrorism effectiveness focusing on its behavior over time, its impact on preventing casualties and property losses. The study underlying this Policy Briefing used data on transnational terrorism from the ITERATE database...

International policy standards in the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing are set forth by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommendations on Anti-money laundering (AML)/Combating the financing of terrorism (CFT) policies. While those standards are very high and...

The processes whereby security policy tackles security challenges and converts them into security priorities (at least since September 11, 2011) are criticized by experts working in the field as erratic and susceptible to media and society pressures. We are always being warned of the emergence...