Environment And Regional Trade Agreements

This study provides an overview of approaches to environmental issues in RTAs and summarises country experiences in their negotiation and practical application.

The mushrooming of trade agreements and their interlinkages with environmental governance calls for new research on the trade and environment interface. The more than 700 existing preferential trade agreements (PTAs) include ever more diverse and far-reaching environmental provisions. While missed opportunities remain and harmful provisions persist, numerous environmental provisions in PTAs entail promising potential. They promote the implementation of environmental treaties and cover numerous environmental issues. New concepts, data, and methods, including detailed content analysis across multiple institutions, are needed to explain these interlinkages and understand whether and how PTAs with environmental provisions can contribute to tackling global environmental challenges. Making use of the most extensive coding of environmental provisions in PTAs to date and combining quantitative data with qualitative analyses, this Element provides a comprehensive yet fine-grained picture of the drivers and effects of environmental provisions in PTAs. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book explores bilateral and regional trade agreements, and examines how they are changing international trade rules. It offers an important contribution to the current debate on the role of the WTO in regulating international trade and how WTO rules relate to new rules being developed by regional trade agreements.

The Handbook offers an introduction to the key elements of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs), addressing the practical economic and legal aspects of the regulatory policies in PTAs.

Green Trade Agreements reviews and analyses the environmental provisions that have become an important characteristic of the growing number of bilateral and regional free trade agreements. This book examines the range of approaches to these environmental provisions, evaluates their effectiveness and suggests potential improvements to the process.

Rafael Leal-Arcas expertly examines the interface of climate change mitigation and international trade law with a view to addressing the question: How can we make best use of the international trading system experience to aim at a global climate change agreement? The insightful book contributes to developing the architecture for a post- 2012 global climate agreement and, in doing so, seeks and proposes new approaches to climate change mitigation by linking it to the international trade system. The author suggests the adoption of a bottom-up approach to climate change negotiations by using the evolution of multilateral trade agreements as a model for reaching a global climate treaty. He discusses the innovative approach of inserting climate goals within regional trade agreements, given their proliferation – especially bilateral – in the international trading system. He explains the trade implications of climate change mitigation policies by analyzing a couple of areas where the international regimes for trade and climate change mitigation may potentially clash. Climate Change and International Trade will strongly appeal to undergraduate and graduate students of international and European trade law, international and European environmental law as well as social science academics. NGOs, think tanks, practitioners, researchers, and international organizations will also find plenty of valuable information in this timely resource.

A multi-disciplinary investigation of how economic globalization can help achieve the UN's 2030 Agenda, exploring trade-offs among the Goals.

From Exception to Promotion: Re-Thinking the Relationship between International Trade and Environmental Law tells a new, unconventional story of the nexus between international trade and environmental law - a story in which the keyword is synergy rather than conflict, and where the trade regime was always meant for something greater than simply trade liberalization. This ‘something greater’ was peace in the first half of the 20th century. Today, it is sustainable development, environmental protection, and social inclusion. Environmental protection is therefore neither antithetical to the overarching purpose of the trading system nor simply a ‘non-trade’ issue to be incorporated within the trade regime, but rather part of its very nature and purpose. By telling this ‘untold’ story of the nexus, this book intends to raise historical awareness and open a constructive discussion on the future of the trade regime and of international economic law governance at large.