Energy legislation and regulations
The Kyoto Protocol is the main international instrument for tackling climate change, signed by the European Community on 29 April 1998. In addition there are several other international instruments to ward off climate change.
Kyoto Protocol
The Kyoto Protocol is the main international instrument for tackling climate change, signed by the European Community on 29 April 1998. It contains the commitments of most of the industrialised countries to limit and to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases over the period of 2008 - 2012.
The Kyoto Protocol is available here »
European Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings (2002/91/EC) (EDPB) The EDPB aims to tackle energy use of buildings, which at present use some 40 % of all energy consumption in Europe.
The EDPB is available here »
Energy end-use efficiency and energy services Directive (2006/32/EC) (ESD) The ESD requires European Union Member States to adopt a range of measures in order to improve energy end use efficiency by 9% over a period of nine years from 2007 to 2016.
The ESD is available here »
European Commission Energy Efficiency Action Plan
The Action Plan is a framework of policies and measures to intensify the process of realising the 20 % savings potential in European Union’s annual primary energy consumption by 2020. The plan lists a range of cost-effective measures, proposing priority actions to be initiated immediately and others to be initiated gradually over the plan’s six year period.
Energy Efficiency Action Plan is available here »
REACH Regulation (EC 1907/2006)
REACH is a new European Community Regulation on chemicals and their safe use. It deals with the registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemical substances. The law entered into force on 1 June 2007. REACH aims to improve the protection of human health and the environment through the better and earlier identification of the intrinsic properties of chemical substances. The REACH regulation gives greater responsibility to industry to manage the risks from chemicals and to provide safety information on the substances. Manufacturers and importers will be required to gather information on the properties of their chemical substances, which will allow their safe handling, and to register the information in a central database run by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) in Helsinki.