Legal Analysis of the EU Policy for Sustainable Transport Biofuels

摘要

The enforcement and implementation of separate aspects of sustainable development and environmental sustainability can be challenging and innovative due to the complexity of this task. Appropriate policy and legal approaches and tools can be needed for this purpose. In this article, the EU experience of developing the framework for sustainable transport biofuels and special structural elements for its enforcement are highlighted and analyzed. The central legal acts in this area, including Directive 2003/30/EC, Directive 2009/30/EC and Directive 2009/28/EC are explored. Advantages and disadvantages of the EU approach to sustainable transport biofuels are discussed. Suggestions for the future development are made. Among them, the ideas to establish an international regime for sustainable transport biofuels are promoted and reflected on. In the work, special focus is laid on the content of Directive 2009/28/EC and the requirements, which it imposes on the EU Member States. The significance of the 2020 binding targets for renewable energy is highlighted, and their possible consequences are discussed. The content of the EU sustainability criteria for biofuels is explained. The cooperation mechanisms and monitoring requirements to the EU Commission and Member States are examined. The EU approach to combine the quantity of the consumed biofuels, which has the form of the binding targets for the EU Member States, and their sustainable quality, expressed as the list of the sustainability criteria, is viewed as efficient and sustainable from an environmental perspective. Though the EU policy for sustainable transport biofuels is still under development and constant improvement, it can be seen as an instructive example of how environmental goals and policy measures can be organized and promoted with the help of binding legal regulations. Certain aspects of the EU approach to sustainable transport biofuels can be efficiently borrowed by other industrial sectors, as well as by other countries that wish to develop a framework for sustainable energy.