The European Union’s Role in the Development of Global Environmental Law

Abstract

This article is focusing on the role that the European Union (EU) is playing as a global actor when it is using its ‘internal’ regulatory power as well as its parallel market power ‘externally’ to strengthen and to fill out gaps in the global environmental law. The EU is at the forefront of international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emission as one of the most important global challenges, and the mentioned regulatory role of the EU is illustrated in this article by three examples related to GHG emissions from transport: The EU’s use of the ‘cap and trade’ principle on all aircrafts that arrive or depart from its territory; the EU’s proposal on the use of monitoring, reporting and verifications (MRV) obligations on all ships that arrive or depart from its territory; and the EU’s use of mandatory sustainability criteria on all biofuels used by road traffic. These examples involve transnational regulation of private sector actors. The EU ambitions are to ensure a model for global norms in situations, where the international regimes are ineffective. The EU legislator has the European Court of Justice’s word for its right to permit a commercial activity to be carried out by foreign enterprises only on its territory provided that the operators comply with the EU norms; and it has the Court’s word for its right to act with exclusive external competences to ensure an export of the norms also in situations where it is the Member States of the EU—and not the EU—that are the accepted parties of the international organisation that the EU wants to push.