This volume presents strategic lines of instrumentation for the future climate policy instrumentation in the EU, both for the short and the long term, closely related to energy policy and other policy domains like transport and housing.

This policy brief describes policy pathways for the evolution of the current EU climate policy mix. It defines combinations of instruments that have a reasonable chance of meeting the desired emissions targets. Policy pathways are defined based on three policy dimensions: 1) Carbon pricing, 2) Technology policies and 3) Behavioural Change promotion. Although each pathway focuses more attention in one type of instruments, all packages have a certain combination of the three policy dimensions to meet the targets. Finally, instruments to adapt EU climate policy to different international conditions are explored.

This report provides a conceptual, a legal and an institutional overview of the European Union as well as three Member States – Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom – to highlight prominent regulatory approaches. The three Member States were chosen for their contrasting characteristics: they represent different legal systems, different approaches to governance, and different historical attitudes towards certain regulatory approaches. Besides arguably differing in their overall approach to climate policy, they have chosen different instruments with which to accomplish EU climate and energy provisions. Lastly, while the United Kingdom and Germany are "old" Member States, Poland is one of the "new" Member States of the EU.

Paul Ekins, Paul Drummond & Benjamin Görlach (2017) Policy instruments for low-carbon development based on work from the EUFP7 project, CECILIA2050, Climate Policy, 17:sup1, S1-S7, DOI: 10.1080/14693062.2016.1272044