How can EU battery regulations help improve global sustainability governance in other sectors?

Batteries are an essential part of our everyday lives. They are also central to the Green Transition, powering everything from electronic devices and electric vehicles to renewable energy storage. However, producing batteries has significant environmental impacts. Mining and processing raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, and recycling all contribute to a battery’s carbon footprint. In addition, battery supply chains are highly globalized, but the rules governing their environmental assessment are often developed at national or regional levels, making their footprint difficult to measure, report, and verify.

In a new paper titled “A Brussels Effect for Battery Sustainability,” researchers examine how the European Union’s Batteries Regulation could change this. As part of the study, IIASA scientists collaborated with researchers from the Leiden University in the Netherlands, Nanjing University in China, and ecoinvent in Switzerland.

The paper highlights that Europe currently plays a relatively limited role in several upstream stages of battery production. However, Europe remains heavily dependent on imports across many stages of the supply chain. This creates a fundamental challenge: batteries placed on the European market depend on raw materials, electricity, and manufacturing processes located in countries or regions with different reporting requirements.

Researchers explain that the EU Batteries Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 represents an important shift toward life-cycle-based sustainability governance. The paper also explores in detail the draft Delegated Act (DA) establishing the calculation and verification of the carbon footprint for electric vehicle batteries, the most technically developed DA supplementing the Regulation.

“The EU is in the process of formulating policy to ensure that the electric vehicle and large stationary batteries used in the EU are produced with low greenhouse gas emissions,” says Edgar Hertwich, study coauthor and Principal Research Scholar in the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program. “Battery production requires a lot of materials and energy, and the emissions during production can be substantial if coal is used. Raw materials and components for batteries come from outside the EU, and so do most batteries. The proposed EU battery regulations require that importers document the emissions following a set of rules for evidence collection that the EU has defined.”

The paper shows that there are clear advantages to this approach. Standardized data and calculation methods can make environmental performance more comparable and potentially improve transparency across the market. However, the authors also highlight a potential trade-off between consistency and representativeness. For example, geographically specific and potentially more accurate data may be excluded if it does not meet the required compliance framework. The authors therefore argue for a more a rigorous yet representative approach, enabling the use of alternative data or modeling methods that demonstrate comparable accuracy and integrity.

“The challenge is not rigor versus representativeness,” says Ranran Wang, study coauthor and professor at Nanjing University. “We need a system that is rigorous enough to support credible sustainability claims, but also able to work with evidence generated across very different production contexts.”

Beyond Europe, beyond batteries

In the paper, researchers also point to a broader phenomenon: the Brussels Effect. Traditionally, the term describes how EU regulations can influence practices outside Europe because companies around the world choose to follow European rules to maintain access to the EU market. Classic examples of the Brussels Effect include the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which have demonstrated how EU regulations can become global reference points.

This could have implications beyond batteries. The battery passport is described in the paper as an early test case for a wider digital product passport system, with potential applications in other sectors, such as textiles and electronics.

“Overall, the rules could be a model for other products as well. Emissions along supply chains are a significant problem for all jurisdictions seeking to address greenhouse gas emissions from industry,” explains Hertwich. “The EU battery regulation could hence be a model for adoption for other products, such as EVs and AI models, and thus help other regions deal with the same problems. We welcome the policy and see it as a significant development that can make an important contribution to climate change mitigation. On the other hand, the system as proposed is EU-centric and has received too little input from other regions. Such a system would have more chance to yield actual emission reductions, and to be adopted by other regions, if the rules were co-designed with producing regions.”
 

Reference:

Liang, Y., Hertwich, E., Istrate, R., Valente, A., Wang, R., (2026). A Brussels Effect for Battery Sustainability. Science. DOI10.1126/science.aed8133. [Insert Link]