Joint implementation and EU accession countries

The countries wishing to join the EU have a high potential for low cost greenhouse gas emission reduction. As they cannot join the ?bubble? agreement for the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, project-based Joint Implementation (JI) could be a powerful strategy to integrate accession countries into an overall EU climate policy strategy. An important question in this context is whether the ?acquis communautaire? will be used to define the baseline for the calculation of emission reductions from JI projects. A problem is that the grace periods for several environmental sectors, e.g. for application of the IPPC directive, differ considerably among countries. The EU should help accession countries to establish a predictable legal framework on which to base JI preventing in this way the current legal uncertainty regarding procedures of JI. Moreover, it should aim at an early implementation of the monitoring guideline and couple it with technical assistance. This would allow to build strong inventory systems in the accession countries and thus avoid the risk that JI is restricted to the second, strongly supervised track.