Now available "Different Paths to the Same Goal? The Potential of BITs and FTAs for Achieving Climate Objectives" - TDM 1 (2024)
Published 19 February 2024
Different Paths to the Same Goal? The Potential of BITs and FTAs for Achieving Climate Objectives
Alessandro Monti, University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Law
Executive Summary
The rapid growth of bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) has brought about novel opportunities to enhance consistency between international climate and economic law. Provisions aimed at promoting trade in environmental goods and ensuring consistency with climate change objectives can be increasingly found in recent FTAs and Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs). This is in sharp contrast with the scarce attention such issues have received in multilateral trade agreements, as well as in earlier BITs. Despite such progress, the fragmented landscape of FTAs and BITs gives rise to mixed outcomes in terms of promotion of climate objectives. In this regard, legal scholarship has been increasingly grappling with the question of how climate concerns are being addressed in FTAs and BITs, examining in particular how `new generation' BITs and FTAs may improve the pre-existing legal framework. Yet, less attention has been devoted to comparing how climate considerations are respectively addressed in FTAs and BITs. Against this background, this article develops an analytical framework aimed at highlighting similarities and differences between climate- related provisions in FTAs and BITs. It sheds light on how innovative FTAs and BITs have progressively integrated climate provisions, while pointing out the respective challenges for FTAs and BITs to support climate action.
The Article is available here "Different Paths to the Same Goal? The Potential of BITs and FTAs for Achieving Climate Objectives" (www.transnational-dispute-management.com/article.asp?key=3047) and is part of TDM 1 (2024).