An article by TV&P lawyers was published in the International Trends Journal (indexed in Scopus). The authors note that the international community considers expanding of the use of renewable energy sources as one of the ways to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. At the same time, renewable energy is often linked to such a concept as "energy transition" - that is, a broader process of structural transformation of the global energy.

In this regard, the authors raise the question: how do international legal documents on cooperation in renewable energy affect the speed and quality of such global energy transition to "clean energy"? The answer that the authors come to is that the role of such sources of law is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, international environmental agreements, regional cooperation mechanisms, and "soft law" documents reflect a positive attitude of the global community towards renewable energy as a factor in the energy transition.

At the same time, this category of documents is intended to limit the promotion of renewable energy projects to compliance with the basic principles of international environmental law. That is, the interests of ecological protection come first.

On the other hand, energy-neutral investment agreements (in particular, the Energy Charter Treaty) and WTO documents increase states' costs and end energy consumers to implement such transition. This is due to a few collisions of these documents with the growing environmental priorities of energy policies in developed countries.

The authors propose the following foundations for international cooperation in the field of renewable energy: minimization of environmental risks, exchange of best practices for encouraging renewable energy sources and sustainable limitation of consumption of hydrocarbon energy sources, cooperation with a wide range of non-state actors, elimination of collisions between sources of international environmental law and sources of global trade and investment law.

You can download the article in PDF format from our website (in Russian)..

The International Trends journal focuses on the theoretical understanding of international trends and the planetary political, economic, and legal environment. Its main objective is to analyze the phenomena of world politics and their impact on Russia and assess the extent to which the country's policy complies with global trends.