The Failure of the Environmental Code – A Retrospective –

The beginning of February 2009 saw the failure of a particularly ambitious and long-needed project to reform and restructure environmental law in Germany – the Environmental Code (Umweltgesetzbuch). Environmental provisions, currently scattered over many individual acts, were to be united and consolidated into a single code. The aim was to create a modern, user-friendly and integrated environmental law involving as little bureaucracy as possible. In their government programme of November 2005, the current coalition parties agreed to implement the reform before the next parliamentary elections in September 2009. In accordance with this mandate, in November 2007 the Federal Environment Ministry submitted a draft proposal for an Environmental Code. However, differences of opinion could not be overcome and the project failed before the parliamentary procedure had even begun. While a number of other European countries already have a consolidated environmental law, for the present Germany still has no such unified code. The failure of the Code is particularly unfortunate for small and medium-sized enterprises, which would have benefited from this simplification of the law and the consequent streamlined bureaucracy, but it is also a missed opportunity for Germany to strengthen its environmental protection.