Our grassroots network from all over Europe has spent decades fighting for a sustainable and just world. We have won key battles on climate, food and farming, resource use and curbing corporate power at the EU level and beyond.
Exposing and blocking a climate action killer
Since the 1990s, a little-known Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) has been used by big polluting energy corporations to block action on the climate crisis. In the last few years, by exposing scandals, we helped put the Energy Charter Treaty at the centre of controversy. In 2021, leaks from the negotiations to supposedly “modernize” the treaty revealed that the talks were failing. We continued mobilising and kept campaigning through the next two years, even bringing the ECT-rex – a giant inflatable dinosaur – on a tour across the continent to finally make the treaty a thing of the past. More than one million people signed our petition, and more than 400 civil society organisations signed a statement asking countries to withdraw. The result: a wave of countries (including Germany, France, Spain, the UK) announced their exit, and just before the elections of 2024 the EU officially greenlit its withdrawal too.
Bursting the gas bubble
We have successfully scandalised the use of public funds for new large-scale gas infrastructure projects in Europe. In 2021 we helped bring two technical legislative EU processes into the public sphere through on-the-ground actions, petitions, movement-building, and online campaigns – with huge support from highly visible actors such as Greta Thunberg and Mark Ruffalo. Together with our advocacy work towards the EU institutions these efforts helped deliver a victory against the public financing of fossil fuels; traditional fossil gas projects can no longer receive public money.
More than 1 million voices for bees and farmers
As a result of a powerful civil society mobilisation, 1.2 million citizens signed the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) call to “Save bees and farmers”. The petition calls on the EU institutions to phase-out synthetic pesticides by 2035, to restore biodiversity, and to support farmers in their transition to environmentally-friendly farming practices.
Building new narratives of an environmentally and socially fair economy
With our landmark paper “7 Sparks to Light a New Economy” we inspired action to wholly transform the current dominant growth-based, capitalist, neoliberal economy, and to dismantle the power structures maintaining and driving it. As a first step, we got the European Parliament to organise two high-level conferences on degrowth with top political leaders and supporters of the beyond-growth movement. The second one in 2023 arguably became the largest political event in the European Parliament in five years. It reignited debates across EU Member States and inspired beyond growth conferences in Italy, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, France, and Scotland’s national parliaments.
Making politics fossil free
In 2019, we co-founded the Fossil Free Politics coalition which works on cutting fossil fuel interests out of EU decision making. We kept a close eye on the relationship between the European Commission and fossil fuel industry lobbyists by analysing the number of revolving doors and conducted research into the number of meetings between Von der Leyen’s Commissioners and fossil fuel overlords, and spoiler alert, they amounted to nearly one per day since the mandate started. We also launched an EU-wide petition demanding to kick polluters out of politics, which was signed 100.000 times and helped pave the way to a public hearing in the European Parliament Petitions Committee (PETI). In early 2024, The PETI committee listened to experts on lobbying, political economy and energy poverty, who all set out the detrimental role the fossil fuel industry played on people across Europe during the energy and cost of living crises in this very first public hearing on the topic of fossil fuel industry lobbying.
Energy poverty at the center of the EU agenda
Ensuring the eradication of energy poverty was put at the heart of the energy crisis response by injecting research, insights and lived experience into the debate of how to tackle the energy and cost of living crisis. We have steered the work of the Right to Energy coalition, made up out of climate, social justice, health and workers’ rights organisations, in raising awareness about energy poverty and advocating for milestones that would protect the most vulnerable households from rising energy costs.
Holding businesses accountable
In 2020 the European Commission announced that – after a decade of campaigning – it was preparing a law to hold businesses accountable for human rights, climate and environmental violations: The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). Together with more than 100 European civil society organisations in 2022 we launched the Justice is Everybody’s Business campaign to channel the public’s call for a strong law to protect people climate and the environment from shady business practice. The campaign organised numerous actions throughout the EU – there was a succession of protests, movie screenings, speaker tours and digital petitions – to raise awareness amongst journalists, decision-makers and the public, and to make them understand the need for this complex piece of legislation. Whilst civil society mobilized and even sent an inflatable Lady Justice throughout the continent, business and reluctant governments attempted to water down and sabotage the directive, but justice finally prevailed and the law became reality in 2024.
Read our annual reviews for more details on our biggest successes and other campaign highlights.
