The European Union's implementation of the Paris Agreement

This chapter provides an overview of EU legislation implementing its Paris Agreement commitments. This legislation forms a uniquely comprehensive package, marked by ambition, loyalty to the Paris outcome, but also, reflecting the European Union’s technocratic and market-based nature, complexity, methodological conservatism, and the use of goals and targets as a primary technique. Complexity and targets are not always a happy match, and can lead to frustration, backlash, and non-compliance, making it a concern that enforcement is an area where the EU legislation is relatively weak. The future will reveal whether, alongside all this detail, constitutional principles will emerge out of the European Union’s climate law and provide bottom-up civil-society pathways to litigation and enforcement.