Better Environmental Regulation

Improved environmental law is effective, enforceable and free of contradictions and unnecessary bureaucracy. The German Environment Agency strives to improve environmental law, for example through harmonisation and standardisation, without compromising an appropriate level of protection of the environment. Overarching codes like a general climate protection law or an Environmental Code can help to improve legislation in that way. A comprehensive climate protection law was created with the Federal Climate Protection Act (KSG) of 2019. It regulates binding annual emission quantities and reduction targets for greenhouse gas emissions for various sectors until the planned climate neutrality is achieved in 2045.

Part of Better Regulation is to mitigate bureaucracy, thereby reducing undue bureaucratic hurdles for citizens, businesses and public administration, which legal regulations can create. Both the German Federal Government, at national level, and the European Commission at European level have put programmes for Better Regulation into place.

The German Environment Agency aims to make environmental law more efficient and user-friendly by reducing bureaucracy and thereby raise acceptance among the public and private businesses. At the same time, the aims of environmental law must be taken into account and a high level of protection must be guaranteed. Environmental law that is both ambitious and user-friendly, the goals of better environmental legislation and bureaucracy reduction can go hand in hand.

Key tool of Better Regulation and bureaucracy reduction are Regulatory Impact Assessments, which reveal the relevant impact of a regulation. The assessment addresses besides the compliance costs of a regulation its benefits for society as a whole. The German Environment Agency makes this clear in its position paper "Better Regulation through more Transparency in Regulatory Impact Assessments".The National Regulatory Control Council also plays an important role in this regard, calculating the follow-up costs of every bill introduced by the federal government and reviewing proposals with regard to legal and administrative simplification.
 

Since 2020, the focus in connection with the keyword ‘better regulation’ has been primarily on speeding up procedures and approvals. The aim of speeding up planning and approval processes is to shorten the duration of procedures, among other things by making appropriate changes to the law. Although efforts to speed up processes are not new, a particularly large number of so-called “acceleration laws” were enacted during the 19th and 20th legislative periods of the German Bundestag. Some prominent examples of this include the Planning Security Act (PlanSiG), the Investment Acceleration Act and the Act to Accelerate the Use of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG Acceleration Act – LNGG).

With the so-called ‘Easter package’, several acceleration laws were created in the course of the Onshore Wind Energy Act, the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG), the Wind Energy Area Requirements Act (WindBG) as well as amendments to the Building Code (BauGB) and the Spatial Planning Act (ROG) to promote the expansion of renewable energies in order to tackle the climate crisis.

The laws mentioned are just a few examples in the long list of acceleration laws. These national acceleration laws are partly based on acceleration efforts by the EU, which are reflected, for example, in the amendment to Directive (EU) 2018/2001 on the promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources (RED III) and the Council Regulation (EU) 2022/2577 laying down a framework to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy (not in force anymore). The background to this was not only the desire to achieve climate targets, but above all the energy crisis caused by Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. The aforementioned EU legal acts aim to expand renewable energies and thus improve the EU's energy independence from fossil fuel imports.

It remains to be seen whether these laws will actually achieve the desired acceleration effect. Frequent changes to the law can also have a delaying effect, because legislative changes often lead to legal uncertainty if they happen too rapidly. A large number of minor changes to the law also have a negative impact on legal clarity, transparency and user-friendliness. They can therefore also have the opposite effect to better law-making. In addition, the acceleration laws reveal a tendency to increasingly weaken environmental standards and participation rights in favour of acceleration. In the last two legislative periods, for example, exemptions from the obligation to carry out environmental assessments and species protection assessments were permitted and deadlines for public participation were shortened. However, these are important instruments for ensuring a high level of environmental protection and guaranteeing participation rights, which are essential for a democratic constitutional state. Better regulation means, among other things, finding an appropriate balance between the need for swift and, at the same time, high-quality administrative decisions.