KluwerLawOnline.com - European Energy and Environmental Law Review

Balancing Flexibility and Predictable Harmonization for Hydrogen Transmission

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:01:06 GMT

The hydrogen and gas decarbonization package introduces a legal framework for hydrogen transmission. To enable a hydrogen market in Europe as a key building block on the way to a climate neutral economy, a cross-border pipeline infrastructure must be constructed, which demands harmonized regulation. This article analyses how far the new legal framework strikes a balance between flexibility, which is needed to ramp up a new infrastructure, legal predictability, which is needed to facilitate long-term investments and strategies, and harmonization, which is needed for cross-border energy infrastructure. The analysis is based on a general discussion of flexibility, predictability and harmonization in the context of hydrogen transmission and the examination of core rules in various areas of network regulation, operator duties, planning and more. It identifies major trends and mechanisms to enable flexibility or implement predictable harmonization. In particular, the transitional period until 2032, the special financing mechanisms for hydrogen transmission and the rules on repurposing existing natural gas pipelines are discussed. The analysis concludes that the new legal framework is based on a coherent approach, which seeks a balance between flexibility, harmonization and predictability. The timeframe and the connection to the natural gas regime limit flexibility.

Volume 35 Online ISSN 0966-1646

Tortious Liability for Climate Change Inaction: Recent Trends across Jurisdictions

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:01:06 GMT

The article tracks a change of approach taken by national courts within and across legal systems to assessing climate actions in tort. The polycentric nature of climate policy, which had proven fatal to plaintiffs’ earlier cases in common law jurisdictions, has rarely struck judges in continental Europe as a particularly effective defence. Nonetheless, to civil courts, too, the difficulties of linking individual harm to a specific greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter have until recently made the adverse effects of climate change appear conceptually inapt for redress by means of tortious liability. This seems to be changing. If last year’s judgment by the Higher Regional Court of Hamm in Lliuya v. RWE, explicitly admitting the possibility of a successful tortious claim, may have been seen as an isolated artefact (especially against the background of the Federal Court of Justice’s recent orders in BMW and Mercedes-Benz cases), the order by the Supreme Court of New Zealand in 2024 and that by the Cantonal Court of Zug in December 2025 to admit climate-related tort claims to trial suggest an emerging pattern. Its most ‘salient feature’, to use a term from Australian tort jurisprudence, is the courts’ willingness to adopt a variant of the material contribution or material increase in risk tests for establishing causation – which, however, does not guarantee plaintiffs success.

Volume 35 Online ISSN 0966-1646