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.
