Sustainability Assessments

SAs & the impacts of trade and investment agreements

Broad Goal - Mainstreaming sustainable development into trade and investment agreements and policies.

Case Study - Utilisation of comprehensive assessments of existing and future trade and investment agreements to determine where there are opportunities for sustainability and where and how negative impacts on the environment and society can be avoided.

The Challenges

The need to review the impact of trade policy...
Successive rounds of trade negotiations and a growing number of regional and bilateral trade liberalisation agreements have led to the continued liberalisation of trade, and increasing international trade and investment flows.

Attempts should be made to foresee the impacts of such international agreements, which should be subject to appropriate assessment, consistent with traditions of environmental impact assessment, and, more recently sustainability assessment (SA).

Using Sustainability Assessment as a tool...
Principle 17 of UNCED's Rio Declaration on Environment and Development provides that, "environmental impact assessment, as a national instrument, shall be undertaken for proposed activities that are likely to have significant impacts on the environment and are subject to a decision of a competent national authority."

Environmental reviews are increasingly recognised as important tools to facilitate the integration of trade and environmental policy objectives and to measure the non-trade impacts of trade liberalisation, as well as its economic impacts.

Sustainability assessments (SAs), which consider how trade liberalisation affects both the environment and social development, can encourage approaches to trade liberalisation that bring about the greatest welfare gains, and thus promote sustainable development.

The need to get the process right...
The challenge for policy makers is to develop and institutionalise SAs as a tool to help shape trade and investment agreements such that these support sustainable development.

Importantly, strong public policy is based on adequate regard for the views of multiple stakeholders and the ultimate success of any assessment depends not only on the techniques employed to conduct the analysis, but also on the political will to work with stakeholders and balance the competing interests that emerge.

This begins by promoting policy integration at the national level and extends, through co-operation and co-ordination with trading partners, regional and international organisations, to identifying policies at the national and international levels to assure a positive outcome for sustainable development.

The Opportunity

Many governments and international organisations are increasingly seeing the advantage of SAs as a tool for making informed decisions in the course of engaging in international negotiations.

What we do

WWF encourages governments to undertake sustainability assessments of new treaties regulating international trade and investment. This includes working in cooperation with stakeholders as well as with a range of inter-governmental organizations and national governments to encourage governments to institutionalise sustainability assessment, build capacity, and strengthen the experience and practical application of the assessments through case studies.