Felix Ekardt, Jutta Wieding, Beatrice Garske, Jessica Stubenrauch

Carbon & Climate Law Review, Volume 12 (2018), Issue 4, Page 316 - 331

This paper analyses an area of climate governance which is currently undergoing fast developments on the EU and international level: land use and in particular, agricultural land use. Despite all recent developments, current climate policies in the EU as a whole, but particularly land use policies, prove to be of little use in achieving the ambitious temperature limit set out in Article 2 Paragraph 1 of the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement limits global warming to a maximum of 1.5 to 1.8 degrees Celsius. Climate protection law is the basis for the energy transition, which consists at the moment of transforming the electricity sector. Agriculture has not really been integrated yet. In addition, climate governance vastly ignores the fact that different environmental issues (like biodiversity loss, soil degradation and disrupted nitrogen and phosphorus cycles) are interlinked, and that rebound and shifting effects occur. This is despite existing alternative policy options.

Felix Ekardt, Anne-Katrin Exner

Carbon & Climate Law Review, Volume 6 (2012), Issue 4, Page 396 - 407

This essay analyses the evolution of legal rules, questions of law interpretation, as well as climate and development policy effects of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as a mechanism which is linked to state and company-level emissions trading (ETS) and combines transnational climate protection law with the promotion of renewable energies. The essential goal of the CDM is to provide opportunities for cost efficient compliance with the Kyoto Protocol targets entered by Annex I countries, and to assist developing countries in achieving sustainable development. Therefore, Annex I countries are allowed to achieve part of their emission reduction targets by conducting mitigation measures in developing countries. It turns out, however, that specific CDM projects are frequently questionable in terms of climate and development policy. This is also related to enforcement problems, which represent a variation of the common environmental law issue of the latent identity of interests of controllers and controlled ones. It is hence questionable whether the discussed and partly decided reforms of the CDM and the subsequent restrictions adopted by the EU are sufficient to address the underlying deficits. That implies, at the same time, a kind of exemplary governance analysis on the basis of important aspects of the ETS.

Felix Ekardt, Bettina Hennig, Hartwig von Bredow

Carbon & Climate Law Review, Volume 5 (2011), Issue 3, Page 371 - 383

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.

Felix Ekardt, Anne-Katrin Exner, Sibylle Albrecht

Carbon & Climate Law Review, Volume 3 (2009), Issue 3, Page 9

s IPCC Targets Global climate protection will be at the center of negotiations during the Copenhagen Conference in December 2009. It is very likely that climate change is raising challenges for mankind which have never existed in these dimensions before. In view of the sheer enormity of these challenges, we might also have to consider solutions which have previously never existed. To be certain, the global climate is a complex matter. The bottom line of climate protection, however, is quite straightforward:1 it is a matter of significantly

Felix Ekardt, Antonia von Hövel

Carbon & Climate Law Review, Volume 3 (2009), Issue 1, Page 12

s about national and European climate policies are increasingly facing a major obstacle: how can climate policy be advanced without detrimental effects for (national or global) social distributive justice and how can this “socially compatible climate policy” be reconciled with competitiveness concerns in a liberalized global market, particularly in the case of European climate policy if it starts to serve as a model for global climate policy? And how can this lead to a stringent, effective, and fair global climate protection regime for the peri