Reducing the European Union’s environmental footprint through “territorial extension”

Abstract

Recent advances in environmental accounting have allowed us to establish a better understanding of the environmental footprints of countries. There are different kinds of environmental footprints, including prominently a material footprint, carbon footprint, water footprint and land footprint. The EU’s environmental footprint is considerably larger than the global average and is unsustainable when compared with indicative targets that aim to ensure that planetary limits are respected. The EU is also more heavily dependent upon embodied imports of environmental resources than any other world region. Among other tools to tackle its environmental footprint, the EU has started to enact legislative measures in the environmental domain that give rise to ‘territorial extension’ in that they seek to regulate the way in which imported products have been harvested or produced in third countries. This includes measures relating to forests, fisheries, climate change and waste. Although one hears frequent claims to the contrary, an analysis of the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU and of the Word Trade Organizations’s Appellate Body, shows that if carefully designed, measures of this kind may be lawful. This chapter argues that they may also be justified in order to prevent the EU from being complicit in environmental wrongdoing in third countries and that environmental footprint studies using multi-regional input-output analysis can contribute to this by ensuring that the knowledge conditions for complicity are met.