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Trade and Climate Change
By Keith R | September 29, 2008
Topics: Climate Change, Economics & the Environment, Environmental Protection |
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One aspect of the public debate over possible policy responses to global climate change that has been largely missing is the role that international trade measures — and how they are treated by the World Trade Organization (WTO) — will aid or hinder policymaking about climate change. Small wonder, since the possible interactions between trade and climate policy are many, complex and frankly not yet well understood.
The WTO now has out a video of a discussion held at the WTO of this interface between Indonesia’s Trade Minister, Mari Pangestu, and Mark Halle, Director of Trade and Investment at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). They particularly grapple with the role of developing nations in the post-Kyoto climate change regime, and how best to incorporate in that regime the cherished (by developing nations such as those in LAC) principle of “common but differentiated responsibility” found in both the WTO rules and the Kyoto Protocol. Click on the image below to view the video, and let me know what you think of it.
If you want to read more about the trade-climate change interface, the WTO has some pages discussing it in more detail:
- The impact of trade opening on climate change
- WTO Activities and the challenge of climate change
- Climate change and the potential relevance of WTO rules
You can also download all these pages as a single PDF.
I also recomend reading the much longer IISD publication “Trade and Climate Change: Issues in Perspective“, which summarizes the discussions on this very subject at a June 2008 held in Copenhagen, Denmark and sponsored by the Danish Foreign Ministry, IISD, The German Marshall Fund and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development. I am working on a review of this report before adding it to the Temas Reading List.
