TPP environmental commitments: Combining the US legalistic and the EU sectoral approaches
ICTSD | 29 April 2016
TPP environmental commitments: Combining the US legalistic and the EU sectoral approaches
By Jean-Frédéric Morin and Guillaume Beaumier, ICTSD
The US government argues that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), concluded last October with 11 other Pacific Rim countries, “includes the most robust enforceable environment commitments of any trade agreement in history.” But is this really the case? The TPP undoubtedly goes well beyond multilateral trade rules found in the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT-1994) that treats environmental protection merely as legitimate grounds for exceptions to trade liberalisation. In the last decade, however, several other bilateral and regional trade agreements have been signed containing stringent and comprehensive environmental commitments. To what extent is the TPP really ground breaking when compared with these?
