Sophia Künze 
Compliance with the EU ETS [PDF ebook] 
Case Study on the German Implementation

Master’s Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Law – Miscellaneous, Maastricht University (Faculty of Law), course: Environmental Law, language: English, abstract: […] Subject of the examination of the paper is the system of enforcement the EU ETS provides in
the field of monitoring, reporting and verifying by analyzing the compliance tools and by
taking the German implementation as an example to review problems and case law of the first
trading periods.
Since a sound system of enforcement provided by the EU-ETS to ensure compliance is
extremely important, the second chapter of this thesis will review the mechanism foreseen in
the directive, the so-called compliance cycle, which is based on monitoring, reporting and
verifying; taking into account also the enforcement system’s unique characteristics in
contrast to other environmental law instruments. After documenting the obligation of the
operators of the installations covered by the directive have, like monitoring and constantly
reporting on their emission in order to achieve the permission to emit, possibly appearing
problems will be shown. Since the member states themselves are in charge of enforcement and therefore control the
obligations of operators and verifier provided in the Directive 2003/87 in connection with the
Monitoring and Reporting Guidelines of the Commission, in the third chapter of this thesis a
case study will show how this challenge is implemented practically on the German example.
More specifically, after analyzing the framework given by the EU in the Directive 2003/87, it
will be analyzed throughout the third chapter how the German legislator coped with the
challenge of implementing an effective system and what possible weaknesses are detected.
Moreover, it will be reviewed what problems the operators have been facing in the first
trading periods and also how the German authorities dealt with upcoming challenges. Due to
the different operators and the different steps within the compliance cycle, different defects at
different levels may appear: incomplete or incorrect data can be forwarded by the installation
operators, verification by the private verifier could be biased in favor for one party and
installations can emit more than they are allowed to. Additionally case law will show what
role the courts in the compliance system play and how their decisions influenced the
development of the enforcement system in Germany.
At last section four of this article provides some concluding remarks.