The Design of Environmental Impact Assessments of Trade Agreements – is the EU at the vanguard?

The environmental impact of trade agreements has remained a contentious political issue since the early 1990s. Trade actors were early called to conduct environmental impact assessments (EIA) of trade agreements. For example, The OECD Ministerial Council recommended in 1993 that “governments should examine or review trade and environmental policies and agreements with potentially significant effects on the other policy area”. In 2017, the United Nations Environmental Programme and the International Institute for Sustainable Development developed recommendations for conducting an EIA of trade agreements, concerning the timing, the geographical and thematic scope, and the nature of the assessor. Surprisingly, there is, so far, no systematic assessment of how trade actors conduct EIAs of trade agreements and to what extent current practices in EIAs of trade agreements are in line with these recommendations and the more general Convention on Environmental Impact Assessments in a Transboundary context. This study investigates the design of EIAs of trade agreements. Who conducts them and how? To what extent have trade actors incorporated what kind of environmental risks in trade agreements? Do EIAs converge or diverge and which elements of EIAs diffuse internationally? Specifically, we are interested in who assesses the environmental impact of trade agreements, for which trade agreements EIAs are conducted, how the environmental impact is defined, and what geographic and thematic scope and method are used in such assessments. By collecting and examining more than 100 environmental impact assessments of trade agreements notified to the WTO since 1995, we classify this information according to the four criteria of the UNEP-IISD recommendations, which provide a benchmark for assessing the quality and validity of the EIAs. We illustrate the usefulness of this novel dataset by analyzing the EU’s regulatory approach to EIAs of trade agreements in a comparative perspective with other trade actors conducting similar assessments of trade agreements, i.e. the USA, Canada, the UK, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, and China. Our preliminary findings indicate that the EU is leading the international field with 35 EIAs of 41 EU trade agreements (85%), engaging independent consultants for the EIA of its trade agreements, and conducting reviews of the environmental impact for both parties involved. However, current EIAs of trade agreements are still rather far from UNEP recommendations, particularly concerning the impact on third parties, the assessment of ex-post analyses, and standard indicators of environmental impacts. The dataset on the design of EIAs of trade agreements that we build allows longitudinal and comparative insights on how and to what extent environmental risks have been incorporated into bilateral and regional trade policy. Here we use it to put the EU’s approach to environmental risk and impact assessment of trade agreements in a comparative perspective but the dataset will also be useful for the broader academic and political debates on the institutional design of trade agreements, the compatibility of trade and environmental policy as well as environmental impact assessments and risk regulation in a general context.