Suchergebnisse

Eco-balance, life cycle assessment, DIN EN ISO 14040, life cycle inventory analysis, life cycle impact assessment, life cycle interpretation, waste balance, environmental management system, survey on LCA, waste law, dangerous substances law, voluntary modells, eco-audit, environmental code, requirements of determinacy, general clause, LCA obligation, experimental legislation, competition law, business and trade secret, binding effect, participation, transparency

"Ambition" and its variants "progression" and "highest possible ambition" are cornerstones of the Paris Agreement and its 2/1.5 degrees C global warming goals, while ambition is at best implicit in the Framework Convention on Climate Change. Even though only a normative expectation in a system of self-assessment, under the Paris Agreement ambition serves as a yardstick for judging and discussing the adequacy of the NDCs. However, the content and meaning of "ambition" are far from being agreed upon and the applicability of the reformulated principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities does not provide clear answers. In these circumstances, the article looks for guidance from national court decisions that interpret, apply or consider the notion of ambition "on the ground". These decisions address a number of elements of ambition. They may encourage more ambitious national action. However, they are mostly not specific enough to draw robust conclusions from them regarding concrete questions of application.

Without claiming completeness, the paper first analyses major developments of European environmental law in the last period of about 30 years with respect to competences, coverage and structure, principles, strategies and instruments, major features and effectiveness. The overall assessment is moderately favourable as regards conventional environmental problems, but even from this narrow perspective, there also is some unfinished business. Then the paper broadens the perspective and addresses major challenges stemming from global and fundamental issues that European environmental law is confronting.

For quite some time, non-regression of environmental law has been propagated as a principle of international, European and national environmental law. While emphasis has been placed on the 'non-regression movement' in a legal context in the sense that environmental legislation should not back-trap, the non-regression principle also applies to environmental quality as such. This appears plausible since non-regression of environmental law is not an objective in itself but serves to maintain and improve the quality of the environment. An expression of the non-regression principle has been established in the European Water Framework Directive of 2000 (WFD). In contrast to previous EU law, the Directive does not only regulate water pollution but also the ecological quality of water bodies. The case this article deals with concerned the deepening of three segments of the lower Weser in north-western Germany to make the river navigable for very large sea-going vessels up to the ports of Bremerhaven, Brake and Bremen. The legality of the planning permission was challenged by an environmental association before the Federal Administrative Court of Germany. The Federal Administrative Court assumed that the legislature had intended to implement the WFD without rendering German law more severe than the Directive. Therefore, it referred the case to the European Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling on the interpretation of the non-deterioration obligation under Article 267 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). On the 1st July 2015, the Court rendered its judgement on the case. The decision can quite rightly be denominated as a landmark decision on EU water policy. This article assesses this decision of the European Court of Justice on the Non-Regression Principle and specifically addresses remaining open questions not answered by the court.

Article 3 of the EIA Directive (Directive 2011/92) sets out the basic concept of the EIA as a process which shall identify, describe and assess the effects that a particular project is likely to have on the environment. However, if one looks at the following articles of the Directive, the concept of "assessment" seems to have somehow been lost. In particular, Article 8 of the EIA Directive only requires that the results of consultations and the information gathered pursuant to Articles 5, 6, and 7 shall be taken into consideration in deciding on granting consent for the project. This duty to consider relates to the environmental impact report submitted by the developer (Article 5) and the information and views gathered in the consultation of interested authorities, the public at large and, where applicable, foreign authorities (Articles 6 and 7). However, Article 8 of the EIA Directive does not formally require the assessment of the project also to be taken into consideration. Although in the case "Commission v. Ireland" of 2011 the European Court of Justice has clarified that the assessment is independent of the duty to consider and must precede the decision on the admissibility of the project, its role in decision-making on the admissibility of the project remains unclear.
This article argues for (suitable) criteria for the assessment of the likely environmental impacts of projects which are subject to the EIA, focusing on the assessments carried out by the competent authority and the assessment elements of the environmental report and the consultation of interested authorities.

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) took place in Rio de Janeiro between 20 and 22 June 2012. Against the backdrop of a worsening global environment it dealt with a broad range of issues of policy for sustainable development at international, regional, national, and local levels, including reform of the UN institutions in the field of sustainable development. The conference was the largest of all UN summits on environment and sustainable development ever held as from 1972, assembling, apart from representatives of governments and intergovernmental organisations, about 40,000 participants form the press and stakeholder organisations. Around the conference, a great number of - partly high level - side events were held. The conference was concluded with a Declaration ('Outcome of the Conference') named 'The Future we want'.
The author of this article shares some critical comments on the summit outcome. Among other things, he believes that Rio+20 produced only few tangible results and that in particular the whole concept of sustainable development has remained open-ended. Nevertheless, he thinks that a major achievement of the Conference has been the firm commitment by states to increase the role of public participation, especially at the international level, and that the enormous activation of civil society that occurred in the preparation of and during the conference will leave its stamp on future developments.