All the environmental issues related to greenhouse gases have led to a huge improvement of the research about CO2 capture and utilization over the last decades. Carbon dioxide, due to the wide availability and the non-toxicity, is a suitable feedstock material for producing chemicals and its non-reductive conversion allows the synthesis of different organic compounds like methane, methanol, urea and carbonates. The latter class has many applications in chemical industry, such as solvents in liquid-liquid extractions or electrolytes for secondary batteries. A new eco-friendly process is the synthesis of cyclic carbonates from CO2 and diols using cerium oxide, or ceria, as catalyst.