ECCO Foreign Policy programme aims at researching, identifying and promoting new pathways to align Italian and European foreign policy with climate goals and the needs of the energy transition.
Through research, diplomacy and advocacy activities, the programme works to ensure that climate action, in all its dimensions, is perceived and implemented as a foundational and indivisible element of the external projection of Italy and of the European Union. Here is where Italy and Europe should start to outline and play an international leadership role, truly in line with our planet’s current challenges and expectations.
Geopolitics and international relations are more and more intertwined with energy and climate developments at a global level. This entails the definition of new paradigms, which generate challenges and radical changes, but also opportunities for cooperation and development with old and new partners, in search of ways to reconcile national interests with the global transition – two dimensions which can and must walk together.
Energy in Africa: What relations between Italy and Mozambique?
January 2024
An Italy-Congo partnership based on the exploitation of fossil fuels is not the best investment for the country’s economy, as it fuels a vicious cycle of debt, poverty, inequality and corruption and lack of diversification. For Italy, such partnership is not only unprofitable in the face of a declining gas demand under all scenarios, but it would also collide with market new interests. Insisting on gas in the Italy-Congo relationship increasingly ties Italy’s foreign policy to gas policy, and away from its climate commitments.
