The Ecological Adaptability of Trade Governance – Climate and Biodiversity Linkages in Preferential Trade Agreements

Environmental governance through trade remains a wicked problem: On the one hand, international trade is necessary for climate adaptation to deal with environmental shocks. On the other, international trade embodies large amounts of environmental pressures on biodiversity and climate through species invasions, habitat loss, and the distribution of petroleum, gas, cars and aircrafts. Trade agreements as key indirect driver for these trends have incorporated an increasing number of environmental provisions, however the social-ecological link between trade governance and ecological indicators has remained understudied. In particular, it remains unclear where the increase of environmental language in PTAs reflects ecological changes on the ground. How does the integration of environmental provisions in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) relate to changes in ecological indicators in biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions? The study conceptualizes the ecological adaptation of the trade regime in terms of social-ecological systems. Whereas early system approaches in the social sciences have been critized for their inherent stasis, there is new dynamic in social-ecological systems: PTAs might evolve towards polycentricity through the participation of new stakeholders, create legal innovations as complex adaptive systems or react to the interferences of telecoupled effects. To assess the adaptation of the trade regime to changes in ecological indicators, the study first analyzes the coverage and depth of environmental provisions in biodiversity and climate in the full-text corpus of 446 PTAs from the UNCTAD Text-of-Trade-Agreements database between 1948 and 2016 with a Text-as-Data approach based on bibliometrically retrieved dictionaries on biodiversity and climate. In a second step, it mobilizes historical datasets of proxies of biodiversity and climate change to explore the extent to which the coverage of environmental provisions in Preferential Trade Agreements relates to actual changes in greenhouse gas emissions, and biodiversity, with a particular focus on land use changes and biological invasions. The overall aim of the analysis is to contribute to a better understanding of the adaptability of the trade governance regime to the ecological transition biodiversity and climate change from a social-ecological perspective. It further allows to identify adaptation gaps in the current trade regime and to compare policy linkages of the trade regime to biodiversity and climate policy.