THE IMPACTS OF EUROPEAN UNION RENEWABLE ENERGY DIRECTIVE II TOWARDS REPUBLIC OF INDONESIA’S CRUDE PALM OIL EXPORTS TO THE NETHERLANDS (2018-2020)

Abstract

The early 21st century has witnessed major climate change issues in the world. One of the biggest concerns related to that is the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions. Recognized as one of the leading actors on the policymaking of climate change mitigation, the European Union (EU) issued the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) back in 2009 as an effort to reduce GHG emissions by increasing the use of renewable energy resources within its region. However, the EU was seen to be discriminative through its sustainability criteria poured in the directive. Palm oil was one of the commodities who became the victim of the discrimination. The problem was, Indonesia’s Crude Palm Oil (CPO) exports to the EU’s market were on the stake due to the directive. On 2018, the EU came up with the recast of the directive called the Renewable Energy Directive II (RED II). This research will analyze the impacts that the latest directive has brought to the exports of Indonesia’s CPO. As a study case, this research will focus on one country in the EU as the export destination of Indonesia’s CPO, which is the Netherlands. Using qualitative analysis, this research managed to find out that in the case of Indonesia’s CPO exports to the Netherlands, there is no significant negative impact. In fact, most of the impacts were positives as it strengthened the relation between Indonesia and the Netherlands.