EU consultations on simplifying environmental law

The European Commission has held a public consultation on simplifying EU environmental law. The goal of the initiative is to identify regulations that can be simplified or updated to reduce administrative burdens, especially for SMEs, while maintaining high environmental standards. The deadline for submitting opinions to the European Commission was September 10, 2025.

What was the purpose of the consultations conducted?

Stakeholder feedback gathered during the consultation will help make the implementation of environmental regulations faster, easier and cheaper, making life easier for businesses in the EU. Actions could include streamlining administrative obligations, eliminating duplicative reporting requirements, promoting further digitization of reporting, and addressing permitting issues. The consultation’s main objective was to identify EU policies whose simplification can bring real benefits to operators without adversely affecting the EU’s environmental and human health objectives.

How did the consultation proceed?

The European Commission is reviewing environmental legislation to identify acts that have the potential to simplify administrative processes. It seeks to reduce administrative burdens without affecting the environmental goals agreed upon in existing legislation. The aim is not to lower the EU’s environmental or human health protection goals under EU legislation, but to achieve them more efficiently without generating unnecessary costs for businesses (especially SMEs), public administration and society. This will make it faster, easier and cheaper to implement environmental policy, while enabling the achievement of environmental goals. One of the main elements of the ongoing work is public consultation.

How will the environmental law be simplified?

As announced by the European Commission, the forthcoming environmental draft will include a series of measures aimed at simplifying regulations for a closed-loop economy, industrial emissions and waste management.

In addition, policy measures will be developed to reduce the administrative burden without undermining the environmental goals pursued by the legislation. These measures should reduce the costs of reporting, monitoring, notification, auditing and other administrative duties, and streamline administrative procedures.

The policy measures developed should make it possible to achieve the environmental objectives of EU legislation in a more efficient and cost-effective manner, in order to make it easier and more effective for EU industry to comply with environmental policy. They should also reduce the demands on member states’ competent authorities, enabling better implementation and enforcement.

What is the reason for the need to simplify environmental law?

The Commission President’s policy guidelines for the 2024-2029 termattach great importance to implementation and simplification: making EU law more effective and creating a regulatory environment in which businesses can thrive, while preserving the goals of EU legislation.

The Competitiveness Compass identifies the policy changes needed for the EU to keep up with the new reality and develop innovative ways to work together to increase the political weight of the Commission’s legislative proposals. A key way to achieve this will be to simplify the regulatory environment and reduce administrative burdens without undermining policy goals. The Compass sets the goal of reducing administrative burdens by at least 25 percent for all businesses and by at least 35 percent for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Eurobarometer survey No. 549, conducted among SMEs in 2024, found that regulatory complexity has negatively impacted their intention to green their operations through resource efficiency, renewable energy and other measures. 35 percent of SMEs undertaking resource efficiency measures said they had encountered problems in the form of complex administrative or legal procedures, and 26 percent mentioned complex environmental reporting.

The same issues of administrative complexity and cumulative burden also affect medium and large companies. Following the results of the study, the European Commission has begun work on simplifying environmental laws.

In the article, I used:

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14794-Simplification-of-administrative-burdens-in-environmental-legislation-_en
https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/10017eb1-4722-4333-add2-e0ed18105a34_en
https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3221