The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs has commissioned Copenhagen Economics to evaluate the effectiveness of EU and Member States’ climate policies. In the study, we establish some basic criteria for what a cost-effective policy should be like – both for the EU as a whole and for the individual member states that have to implement the necessary measures to reach the common and national targets. For most EU objectives, the policies entail specific commitments at the national level, such as specific national rate reductions for greenhouse gas emissions up to 2020 as well as expansion of the share of renewable energy.

The study concludes both that lessons have certainly been learned in some policy areas over the past years but also that there is some way to go in other areas. Regarding the functioning of the Emission Trading System (ETS), the study finds that the post 2012 regime is much more effective than the 2005-2012 regime. However, both EU and national policies to support renewable energy need to be improved considerably. In the first place, setting legally binding and somewhat arbitrarily defined national targets for producing renewable energy, for example electricity, is not a cost-effective strategy to deal with neither climate strategy nor indeed energy security.   Read the full report here 

For further information, please contact Sigurd Næss-Schmidt