ACDE seminar: The EU climate policy – targets, instruments, achievements and challenges

Since the early 1990s the European Union has played a pioneering role in the global climate architecture. It has introduced the first multinational emission trading scheme (ETS) in the world and recently announced an ambitious strategy for a new green industrial policy. Against this background my talk is divided into three central parts: First, I will introduce the evolution of the EU emission targets and their interactions with UN environmental activities during the last decades. In order to achieve these targets, the EU has implemented the ETS in 2005 and announced the “European Green Deal” (EGD) in 2019. The structure and development of the ETS over time and the EU approach of a green industrial policy will be described in some detail in the second part of my talk. The third and final part focuses on the main challenges and problems the EU climate policy is facing today: The stabilization and extension of the ETS, the resulting carbon leakage problem and the problematic interplay with national carbon policies that induce the so-called “waterbed effect”. I will close with some remarks on the prospects of the future climate policy in the EU and the world.

Speaker: Professor Hans Fehr, The Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, Germany.