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de Cendra de Larragan, Javier --- "Is EU Climate Change Policy Legally Robust?" [2011] ELECD 656; in Benidickson, Jamie; Boer, Ben; Benjamin, Herman Antonio; Morrow, Karen (eds), "Environmental Law and Sustainability after Rio" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Environmental Law and Sustainability after Rio

Editor(s): Benidickson, Jamie; Boer, Ben; Benjamin, Herman Antonio; Morrow, Karen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857932242

Section: Chapter 17

Section Title: Is EU Climate Change Policy Legally Robust?

Author(s): de Cendra de Larragan, Javier

Number of pages: 21

Extract:

17. Is EU climate change policy legally
robust?
Javier de Cendra de Larragán

1. INTRODUCTION

Climate change has been among the top priorities of world leaders for some
years now. 1 The EU has for a long time sought to play a leading role in the
development of international climate change policy (Gupta and Grubb, 2000;
Oberthür and Roche Kelly, 2008), and has worked hard to ensure that a new
climate change international agreement for the post-2012 period was adopted
at COP-15 at Copenhagen in December 2009. In the run-up to that
conference, Commissioner Stavros Dimas declared:

Over the past two months the EU has set out a comprehensive vision for the
Copenhagen agreement. We now look to our partners to support our positions or to
propose constructive alternatives. 2

However, the fact was that, during the negotiations that took place at
Copenhagen, the EU struggled to have its voice heard, and the final deal ­
known as the Copenhagen Accord ­ was negotiated by the US, China and a
reduced number of developed countries without the active involvement of the
EU. Moreover, the Copenhagen Accord neither supports the EU position in
the international negotiations nor does it propose a constructive alternative as
the Commission wished. That is because the EU position was premised on a
comprehensive and legally binding international agreement, while the
Copenhagen Accord is a non-legally binding and rather vague political
document, which moreover opens up the way for the possible dismantling of
...