Since 1998, the project has worked to link trade and environment.  The project seeks to promote the idea that environmental stresses carry important economic consequences which  need to be considered explicitly in structuring trade and investment agreements. The key question is no longer whether to link trade and environment issues, but how to do it. Our premiss is that that trade processes (such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiations, FTAA) offer not only environmental challenges, but also potential opportunities for advanceing the trade and environment debate.

We seek engage in the trade and environment debate in the Americas through research and writing, expanding the regional scope of our network of interlocutors, interacting with members from the trade, NGO, and academic community and participating in key trade and environment events and dialogues across the hemisphere.

Analysis and Outreach: We seek to advance the analytic argument for including environmental concerns in the hemispheric economic integration process. Vehicles for outreach include generation of new FTAA-focused environmental analyses, the translation of "trade and environment" materials into Spanish, and the participation in the FTAA policy debate. In addition to the translation of English documents into Spanish, this project will seek to "translate" key trade and environment studies and papers from the theoretical language of academia into language more accessible to the general public.

Partnerships in Latin America: Another goal of this project is to work with Latin American counterparts to develop a shared understanding of the issues, obstacles, and opportunities provided by the FTAA. A primary component of this involvement involves participation in workshops hosted by partner institutions in Latin America. Since 1998, we have participated in workshops in Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, Ottawa, Seattle, Punta del Este, and Washington D.C. on various aspects of the political, legal, technical, and strategic issues at stake in the trade and environment debate in the Americas. 

Linkages with the multilateral context: the Project team will track and review environment-related trade developments in other fora including the World Trade Organization, the discussions on investment, the Transatlantic Economic Partnership, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. The goal is to identify useful models and thinking that can be imported into the FTAA process - and to see whether the learning from the FTAA can be applied in these other trade-environment discussions. n section).

Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy
Sage Hall
205 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT
Telephone: 203.432.3123
Fax: 203.432.6597
Email: barbara.ruth@yale.edu