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The previous section described the ways in which trade, environment and development were related at a physical and economic level, mostly focusing on the impacts of trade on environment and development. This section looks at a different class of linkages—the interactions between trade law and environmental law. It was noted earlier that environmental law increasingly dictates how countries shall structure their economies (for example the Kyoto Protocol will, if successful, involve massive changes in investment and production decisions), and trade law increasingly defines how countries should structure their domestic laws and policies in areas such as environmental protection. It is inevitable, then, that the two systems of law and policy will interact.
These can occur at two levels—the national or the international. Nationally, the areas of policy we will treat include subsidies, environmental labelling, intellectual property rights, agriculture, investment, and government procurement. We will also look at national-level environmental standards as they relate to three subjects: discrimination based on the use of process and production methods, the competitiveness effects of different levels of standards between countries, and policy-making under uncertainty. Internationally, we will look at the interaction of the multilateral system of trade with the multilateral regimes for environmental management.
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