EU Climate Policy – Targets, Achievements, and Open Challenges

The Institute for International Trade, the School of Economics and Public Policy, and the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence in Trade and Environment present 'EU Climate Policy – Targets, Achievements, and Open Challenges' with guest speaker Professor Hans Fehr, University of Würzburg, Germany.

In recent years, the economics of climate change has gained increasing prominence in public debate and has become a central theme in international politics. From the outset, the European Union (EU) has sought to play a pioneering role in shaping the global climate policy framework. Since the early 1990s, climate protection has steadily expanded within EU environmental policy and has been embedded as a core objective in nearly all foundational EU treaties.

The EU’s approach to climate policy design and implementation offers several points of particular interest. First, the introduction of the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) in 2005 marked the world’s first multinational carbon market and serves as a model for similar initiatives worldwide. Today, the EU ETS remains the largest emissions trading scheme globally, continuously evolving in scope and design. Second, despite the ETS’s reach, it currently covers only a portion of climate-damaging activities.

As a result, Member States must also implement complementary national climate policies, especially in the transport and housing sectors. This overlap between national and supranational measures generates specific coordination problems and inefficiencies that require careful management. Third, in December 2019, the European Commission launched the European Green Deal (EGD), setting the ambitious goal of achieving climate neutrality across the EU by 2050, with an intermediate target of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by at least 55% by 2030.

In this lecture, Professor Fehr will begin with an overview of the EU’s climate policy evolution and assess its progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions compared to other major global actors. He will then discuss the key mechanisms, achievements, and challenges associated with the EU ETS and the EGD. Finally, he will offer a sober outlook: even if the EU is remarkably successful in its decarbonization efforts, it can ultimately only serve as a role model. Without significant shifts in climate policy from other major emitters such as the United States and China, global warming cannot be effectively halted.

Moderator: Professor Peter Draper, Executive Director, The Institute for International Trade

Event Details:
Date: Wednesday 21 May 
Time: 12 - 1pm followed by finger lunch
Location: Room 7.04/7.05, Level 7, Nexus10, The University of Adelaide

About the Speaker
Hans Fehr is a Professor of Economics at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He earned his Diploma in Economics in 1989 and his PhD in 1992 from the University of Regensburg, followed by his post-doctoral qualification (Habilitation) at the University of Tübingen in 1998. Between 1993 and 1994, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Boston University, and from 1994 to 1998, he served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Tübingen.

Hans’ primary research interests lie in quantitative public economics, with a particular focus on the economic impacts of population ageing, tax policy, social security reforms and more recently climate policy. He specializes in the use of computable general equilibrium models with overlapping generations. His work has been published in leading journals, including the International Economic Review, European Economic Review, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Review of Economic Dynamics, and the Scandinavian Journal of Economics.

He is also a Research Fellow at the Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging and Retirement (Netspar) in Tilburg, the Center for Economic Studies (CESifo) in Munich, and an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR) at UNSW Sydney.