Community legislation: simplifying and improving the regulatory environment

Within the framework of the Action Plan on the Simplification and Improvement of the Regulatory Environment, the Commission presents a communication in which it wishes to encourage the preparation of voluntary environmental actions as well as environmental agreements at Community level, over a wide range of sectors, going beyond those where the Commission has announced its intention to propose legislation. For its part, the Commission intends to recognise and make use of environmental agreements at Community level on a selective case-by-case basis. All in all, leaving aside purely spontaneous decisions initiated by stakeholders in areas in which the Commission has neither proposed legislation nor expressed an intention to do so, not more than four to six environmental agreements are likely to be considered during the remaining term of office of this Commission: - an early candidate would be the PVC Strategy; - similarly, environmental agreements might be considered as part of the follow-up to the Green Paper on Integrated Product Policy. The precise identification of the possible scope of environmental agreements in this field will of course depend on the outcome of the ongoing discussion of the Green Paper; - other policy areas to be considered for the effective application of the instrument are in the fields of waste management as well as climate change. The existing agreements on CO2 reductions from passenger cars might be complemented by similar environmental agreements for light commercial vehicles (LVC). In addition, the Communication "Towards an integrated European railway area"18 proposes voluntary commitments concerning the retrofitting of in-use rolling stock to meet the environmental requirements applied to new rolling stock as a possible policy measure.�