Mitigating and adapting to climate change is a major challenge for our societies. Both international and European law have taken up these issues, but not without difficulty. Without claiming to be exhaustive, both mitigation and adaptation go hand in hand with the economic interests of certain polluting modes of production, on the one hand, and require substantial structural funding, on the other. Faced with these complex issues, this paper aims to look back at Belgian climate governance (and its main characteristics), one of the latest acts of which is the condemnation of the Federal State and the Brussels-Capital and Flemish Regions in November 2023 by the Brussels Court of Appeal for failure to fulfil their obligations in terms of GHG reductions (balance sheet). After outlining some of the possible reasons for the shortcomings of Belgian climate governance, we will propose a number of exploratory legal avenues aimed at overcoming these shortcomings (outlook).

Aurélien Hucq is doing a post-doctorate at UCLouvain on the subject of ‘Belgian federalism and the climate challenge’. The aim of this research is firstly to study whether, and if so to what extent, Belgian federalism is an obstacle to the implementation of ambitious climate policies and, secondly, what levers could be used to this end.

Moderator: Éric Fabri (CTP)