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Global Trade & Climate Change
By Michael Cebon | October 27, 2008
GTW has been making the point for a while is that the global trading system (and how it’s run) affects most other things in the world. Climate change is a good example.
There are a large number of ways that the global trading system and climate change interact, but the most obvious is in driving emissions production by creating new markets for carbon intensive products. For example, GTW research has shown that almost 40% of Australia’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are created by production for export, rather than by Australians themselves.
And of course Australian politicians complain about China’s huge and growing GHG emissions, yet continue support Australia’s huge coal exports to China which create a large chunk of those same emissions.
It should not go unmentioned that the global trading system also has the potential to contribute to the solutions to climate change – for instance by creating markets for clean, renewable technologies. But for the moment, the system continues to add significantly more to the problem of climate change than it does to the solutions.
With this in mind, In June, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) – an NGO based in Canada & Switzerland that has been doing excellent (if a little conservative) research on trade & environment issues since 1990 - held a conference on trade and climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark.
This week they’ve released the background papers from the conference, and there’s lots of interesting reading if this is a topic that you’re concerned about (and let’s face it, who isn’t concerned about climate change? – apart from Andrew Bolt).
You can access the papers and other conference material here.
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