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Authors: Sara Sousa, Sofia Ligeiro
Keywords: environment, environmental taxation policy, legislation, Portugal, Spain
Abstract: The right to a sustainable environment should not be exclusive to our generation and it is up to us to ensure that it remains a right, not an impossibility, for future generations. In this context, a country's environmental taxation policy plays a crucial role as an instrument for defending the fundamental right to a sustainable environment and ensuring its protection. A few decades ago, environmental problems started to generate widespread concern, mainly as a result of high population density, considerable level of industrialisation and strong dependence on fossil fuels. Despite its unquestionable importance in some areas, such as transports and energy generation, the use of fossil resources, in addition to not being renewable, are also responsible for the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere, namely carbon dioxide (CO2), with irreversible and drastic consequences on global warming and climate change - the Earth`s global average temperature has been increasing since 1861 and during the 20th century the increase has been by 0.6 ± 0.2 º C. It is in this context that today's economies have to face the challenge of promoting economic growth, but without pollution growth. There are some solutions to address this problem and promote an efficient strategy to achieve a sustainable development, notably through a significant investment in: efficient resources use, carbon capture and sequestration technologies, and non-polluting resources. These environmental concerns are shared by the 28 Member States of the European Union (EU) which are covered by a common Community legislation, but retain a certain degree of autonomy, allowing to adopt its own environmental taxation policy. What we propose to deepen in this research is how two European countries - Portugal and Spain - use the environmental taxation to persuade their inhabitants to adopt a more sustainable behaviour towards the environmental protection.