<p>Last Thursday, the French government launched a plan to renovate 500,000 homes every year to make them energy efficient and to cut heat loss, power consumption, and carbon emissions. The government will disburse 200 million euros (US $242 million) to help accelerate the plan by training building professionals on new energy efficiency standards and providing aid to families who need to do home renovations.

<p>Environmental experts and activists are closely watching a lawsuit filed against an academic whose testimony helped convict a governor on corruption charges, in a case many fear could set a worrying precedent. Basuki Wasis, an expert on environmental degradation from the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB), has testified in more than 200 cases involving environmental crimes such as forest fires and pollution.

<p>The European Union will ban the world’s most widely used insecticides from all fields due to the serious danger they pose to bees. The ban on neonicotinoids, approved by member nations on April 27, is expected to come into force by the end of 2018 and will mean they can only be used in closed greenhouses. The plummeting numbers of pollinators in recent years has been blamed, in part, on the widespread use of pesticides. The EU banned the use of neonicotinoids on flowering crops that attract bees, such as oil seed rape, in 2013.