External publications

Trade and the environmental poly-crisis: making the World Trade Organization fit to better deal with trade and environment

Akman, Sait / Axel Berger / Carlos Primo Braga / Andreas Freytag / Stormy-Annika Mildner / Claudia Schmucker / Maarten Smeets
External Publications (2024)

T20 Brasil, Task Force 6 (Strengthening Multilateralism and Global Governance), Policy Brief

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The world is struggling with an array of environmental crises. Trade can both fuel and provide solutions for these. Trade policy and environmental protection can thus no longer be viewed in isolation from each other. The World Trade Organization (WTO) plays an important role in this. While the goals of sustainable development and environmental protection were explicitly stated in the Preamble of the Marrakech Agreement (1994), environmental aspects, however, are not explicitly part of the WTO’s multilateral trade agreements. Therefore, the WTO, so far, does not deal sufficiently with the nexus between trade and the environment. The Policy Brief analyses existing WTO rules, monitoring instruments, and committees, as well as ongoing plurilateral negotiations with the following question in mind: How can the WTO help to regulate trade in a way which fosters open, fair, growth-oriented and development-friendly trade relations while at the same time advancingenvironmental protection? The G20 can and should play a key role in better aligning trade and environmental concerns. The Policy Brief recommends that the G20 discuss proposals to enhance current WTO rules to better address environmental concerns and to use dialogue mechanisms to deal with environment-related trade disputes. Furthermore, the G20 should support ongoing discussions on the better alignment of trade and the environment in the WTO Committee on Trade and Environment as well as in plurilateral fora. Lastly, the Policy Brief recommends that the G20 discuss a reform of the WTO’s Trade Policy Reviews to enhance transparency on the trade-environmental nexus.