EU Battery Rules May Set Global Sustainability Standard

Europe's rules for proving environmental performance of battery technologies could reshape sustainability regulation far beyond the European Union (EU), researchers report in a Policy Article. However, as regionally based requirements spread across global industries, differences in data, measurement and verification systems can complicate their application. Sustainability in the global battery industry depends not only on cleaner technologies but also on how environmental claims are documented and verified. The European Union's Batteries Regulation establishes detailed requirements for tracking a battery's life-cycle greenhouse-gas emissions, material circularity, and responsible sourcing. This creates a new dimension of the so-called "Brussels Effect," in which EU standards can become de facto global norms because companies worldwide must meet them to access the European market. Here, Yanan Liang and colleagues examine the EU Battery Reregulation and focus on how its evidence requirements spread internationally. The spread happens through compliance-driven diffusion along supply chains and because international standards organizations and foreign regulators voluntarily adopt similar approaches. Liang et al. found that these processes can improve transparency and credibility but also create challenges when region-specific measurement and verification rules are applied to global production and data infrastructures. To address this, the authors propose a phased approach involving methodological reconciliation, flexible and risk-based verification, and shared governance of datasets.