An Assessment of Environmental and Sustainability Provisions in Trade Agreements

Abstract

Trade agreements have begun to incorporate far reaching, more comprehensive environmental and sustainability provisions, alongside their originally intended trade provisions. This trend which has been adopted in recent trade agreements, can be attributed to several factors ranging from the world’s increasing awareness of climate change and our ever-growing strive towards sustainable development, to the WTO’s own failure to effectively address environmental and sustainability issues at a multilateral level. The aim of this thesis is to further the understanding of environmental and sustainability provisions, by comparing different country approaches towards including these provisions in their trade agreements, using the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement and the European Union-Caribbean Forum Economic Partnership Agreement as case studies. This comparison helped to demonstrate which country’s approach seems to be more effective at triggering change, with the purpose of guiding, informing and transforming future policy. Using a qualitative approach, the findings of the research indicate that a) the development of targeted and innovative sustainability provisions require extensive and comprehensive impact assessments, b) cooperative programs and efforts carried out under trade agreements may be impacted by the level of detail of their impact assessments and their sustainability provisions c) sustainability provisions have the potential to serve as a site of SDG implementation and, d) there is room for the WTO to learn from and implement these approaches to sustainability provisions in its own agreements