Environmental Goods and Services Negotiations at the WTO: Lessons from Multilateral Environmental Agreements and Ecolabels for Breaking the Impasse
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Stefano Ponte; Soledad Aguilar; Aaron Cosbey; Melanie Ashton
- Source
- SSRN Electronic Journal.
- Subject
- Commercial policy
Convention
Negotiation
Goods and services
Rotterdam Convention
CITES
business.industry
media_common.quotation_subject
Climate change
Business
International trade
media_common
- Language
- ISSN
- 1556-5068
This analysis looks for paths to progress in the WTO’s stalled negotiations on environmental goods and services – a set of talks that is frequently cited as trade policy’s natural contribution to climate change objectives. It surveys the experience of a number of multilateral environmental agreements – The Rotterdam Convention (Prior Informed Consent or PIC), the Stockholm Convention (Persistent Organic Pollutants or POPs) and Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora – and ecolabels (looking at coffee, fisheries and the Energy Star label). The results of the survey and a new taxonomy for environmental goods are used to create six recommendations for moving forward.