EU climate policy in turbulent times: understanding the response to the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine
von Homeyer, Ingmar ; Oberthür, Sebastian ; Dupont, Claire
2025
34
7
1238–1258
EU policy ; climate change ; epidemic disease ; energy economics
Environment
https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2025.2510063
English
Bibliogr.
"This article examines how the EU responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, focusing on climate policy. Early studies suggest these crises reinforced EU climate policy, but we go further by investigating key drivers behind these responses. We explore four factors: Commission climate policy entrepreneurship, East–West climate policy divide among Member States, economic assets and interest groups, and the climate movement. The findings indicate that the crises temporarily sidelined East–West divisions and allowed the Commission to promote its flagship European Green Deal. However, the further development of these factors suggests that conditions for EU climate policymaking have deteriorated."
This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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