Recently, a research team led by Associate Professor Ranran Wang at Nanjing University, in collaboration with Leiden University, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and ecoinvent, identified an important shift in global green trade rules: market access increasingly depends both on meeting sustainability requirements and on proving compliance. Using the EU Batteries Regulation as a leading example, the study argues that this shift adds a new dimension to the "Brussels Effect". Because battery supply chains span the globe, much of the evidence required for EU compliance must be generated outside Europe, raising a central challenge: how to maintain rigor while ensuring that credible evidence from diverse production contexts can be recognized. The authors argue that if such evidence systems can work effectively across global supply chains, batteries could provide an important model for how sustainability is demonstrated and governed across other globally traded products. The policy analysis was published online in Science on August 20, 2026, under the title "A Brussels Effect for battery sustainability".

Source: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aed8133