Land use is the second trigger of global climate change – the first being the use of fossil fuels – and thus of utmost importance for the future design of European and global climate policies. The current European and global framework for climate protection does not really consider aspects of land use; if it does , however, it tends to rather introduce new loopholes to the climate protection goals that are, considering the challenges, not very ambitious. The most convincing approach to implementing land use aspects in climate protection law would be a two-stage global emissions trading system (ETS) of entirely new design. A new global ETS would enhance the existing ETS of the Kyoto protocol and combine it with a reshaped European ETS based on the factors primary energy and land-use instead of industry sectors. Admittedly, the integration of land use aspects into climate protection law is difficult for several reasons and the current discussions of approaches for the post-Kyoto phase beginning in 2013 fairly take these difficulties into account. This shows that climate change legislation and emissions trading are not per se helpful, but only in case of ambitious objectives, a stricter enforcement, the prevention of rebound and displacement effects, and a solution of measurement and baseline problems (also, in exchange for high compensation payments for mitigation and adaptation in developing countries, involving all countries around the world is a necessity). Due to the aforementioned factors, any climate protection law that solely relies on efficiency, technical and command and control approaches will, however, be even less capable of providing global quantity control than the existing deficient global and EU ETS. Nevertheless, land use also shows some constraints of an ETS based quantity control.