Revised EU Industrial Emissions Directive

The briefing details the 2024 revisions to the Industrial Emissions Directive (IED), focusing on expanding access to justice, strengthening non-compliance and suspension mechanisms, increasing penalties, and introducing a new compensation right for health damages. It emphasizes alignment with the Aarhus Convention and provides recommendations for Member States to ensure these provisions are effective and dissuasive in practice.

• The revised IED expands the scope of access to justice to include several new procedures, such as updating permits due to operational safety, new environmental quality standards, requests to extend landfill operation, and the publication of new best available techniques (BAT) conclusions.
• Standing in review procedures can no longer be made conditional on whether a member of the public participated in the prior decision-making or public consultation phase, codifying CJEU case law.
• Member States are now obliged to suspend the operation of an installation without delay if a permit breach poses an immediate danger to human health or threatens an immediate significant adverse effect on the environment.
• The revised IED introduces a discretionary power for authorities to suspend operations in cases of persistent breaches that pose a danger to human health or cause significant adverse environmental effects, provided that required restoration actions from inspection reports were not implemented.
• Penalties for the most serious infringements by legal persons must now have a maximum amount of at least 3% of the operator's annual Union turnover from the preceding financial year to ensure they are effective, proportionate, and dissuasive.
• A new compensation right is established for individuals whose health has been damaged due to an infringement of national measures adopted under the IED, requiring Member States to ensure that procedural rules do not make exercising this right impossible or excessively difficult.
• To make the health compensation right effective, the document suggests Member States implement collective actions, disclosure obligations for evidence held by defendants, and presumptions regarding the causal link between pollution and health damage.

APA

Esen, S. (2025). Revised EU Industrial Emissions Directive. ClientEarth. https://www.clientearth.org/media/caedtu0v/revised-ied-access-to-justice-and-enforcement-clientearth-september-2025.pdf

Chicago

Esen, Selin. Revised EU Industrial Emissions Directive. ClientEarth, 2025. https://www.clientearth.org/media/caedtu0v/revised-ied-access-to-justice-and-enforcement-clientearth-september-2025.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Esen |first1=Selin |title=Revised EU Industrial Emissions Directive |publisher=ClientEarth |date=September 2025 |url=https://www.clientearth.org/media/caedtu0v/revised-ied-access-to-justice-and-enforcement-clientearth-september-2025.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{esen2025revised, author = {Esen, Selin}, title = {{Revised EU Industrial Emissions Directive}}, institution = {ClientEarth}, year = {2025}, month = sep, url = {https://www.clientearth.org/media/caedtu0v/revised-ied-access-to-justice-and-enforcement-clientearth-september-2025.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }