The group of World Trade Organization (WTO) members undertaking “structured discussions on trade and environmental sustainability” (TESSD) is moving ahead on its efforts to determine what its work may cover and how – including what they could include in a ministerial statement ahead of the Organization’s highest-level meeting in December.
Their 26-28 May gathering was their second meeting in 2021, with participating members organizing their discussions around a set of topics. These covered environmental goods and services, “greening” Aid for Trade, fossil fuel subsidy reform, border carbon adjustments, and “green” trade.
Going into the meeting, the TESSD coordinators circulated a workplan in early May to help structure the work in the lead-up to the WTO’s Twelfth Ministerial Conference (MC12), which is now only six months away. The event is set for 30 November – 3 December 2021, in Geneva, Switzerland.
That workplan, according to a version seen by the SDG Knowledge Hub, refers to the objective of having a ministerial statement in time for MC12, one which would stress both the importance of dedicated work on trade and environment issues and set out the road ahead after the December ministerial concludes. Its document number is INF/TE/SSD/W/11, though access is currently restricted.
Participating members also noted that there is a wealth of activity underway on trade and environment issues across the WTO membership, including initiatives on plastic pollution and fossil fuel subsidy reform, and that these efforts should be treated as “complementary” and that the work should be “coherent” – without being prescriptive over who should support which initiative.
As with the March meeting of the TESSD, a few select institutions were invited to make interventions at the 26-28 May discussions, including representatives from think tanks, intergovernmental bodies, business associations, and civil society groups. They were invited to participate during the first two days, with the final day open to WTO members only. Participation of external stakeholders remains on an invitation-only basis, and whether the modalities of their participation will remain the same or may be updated as the TESSD evolves is still under discussion.
In their submissions earlier this year on priority items for the TESSD, several participating WTO members had referred to the liberalization of environmental goods and services – along with related topics such as non-tariff barriers and trade facilitation – as an area of interest.
The 26-28 May session dealt with this topic more at length, looking at the ongoing efforts among the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies to update their own list of 54 environmental goods whose tariffs were cut to 5% or less. Participants also considered the lessons that could be learned from the Environmental Goods Agreement (EGA) negotiations, a tariff-cutting initiative by a subset of the WTO’s membership that stalled in late 2016.
The presenters invited to the May session of the TESSD referred to the benefits of using a bottom-up approach in determining which environmental goods could be included, and from there assessing the environmental benefits and likelihood of consensus – rather than imposing a top-down definition of what an environmental good might entail.
Participating members also considered options for addressing some of the sticking points that had emerged under the EGA talks, such as how to deal with so-called “dual use” products, those that have both environmental and non-environmental uses.
Participants also expressed extensive interest in reinvigorating talks on environmental services, along with questions on where is the best avenue for this work. Negotiations on environmental services have traditionally taken place under the Council for Trade in Services in Special Session (CTS-SS), and have looked at the scope and definition of that term, especially given the limited commitments that WTO members have currently in their schedules for that type of services.
The TESSD looked at the history of the talks so far, along with more recent developments, such as the submissions by Australia, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the UK in the CTS-SS to explore a wider scope for the term environmental services. Those submissions are under document numbers JOB/SERV/293/Rev.1 and JOB/SERV/299/Rev.1, though access to both is restricted to WTO members only on the Documents Online portal. They also considered the challenges in dual use environmental services and how the negotiations might address them, along with whether to also address environmental technologies and other topics.
Some participating TESSD members suggested that environmental goods negotiations be resumed at MC12, along with negotiations on environmental services, with the next ministerial conference (MC13) being the target date for reaching a deal. Other ways that the WTO could contribute to members’ efforts at carbon neutrality were also discussed, including a recent submission from Japan (INF/TE/SSD/W/10) on the subject.
Other presentations highlighted initiatives on environmental goods and services that are taking place across several other forums, including the negotiations among Costa Rica, Fiji, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, and Switzerland for an Agreement on Climate Change, Trade, and Sustainability (ACCTS). They are currently working to whittle down a list of approximately 500 products that could be included in a final environmental goods list, along with developing binding commitments on environmental services.
The WTO’s current Aid for Trade work programme runs through 2022 and has as its theme “Empowering Connected, Sustainable Trade.” In March this year, WTO members held a stocktaking exercise that considered the impacts of COVID-19 on trade and trade-related aid, especially for developing and least developed countries (LDCs), ahead the biennial Global Review of the initiative that is planned for 2022.
1990-2021, IISD.