Reducing the EU’s global environmental footprint

Abstract

The EU has a large and damaging global environmental footprint, and as a region it is heavily dependent on environmental resources that originate outside its borders. This Article begins by illustrating the scale of the EU’s global environmental footprint. It goes on to demonstrate that the EU has been commendably proactive in generating the data needed to evaluate this. It has also adopted a series of measures that seek to mitigate the negative external—third country—environmental effects of EU consumption. Though measures of this kind are sometimes controversial, it is argued that the EU is justified in adopting them. Such measures nonetheless give rise to difficulties and dilemmas which the EU ought not to ignore.