The Trade and Climate Change Day
ICTSD event at COP 15
Venue: Clarion Hotel Copenhagen
Date: 15 December 2009
Start time: 09:00 End time: 18:30
The ICTSD Trade Day explored the most pressing challenges at the core of the trade and climate change debate, providing a space for constructive interaction among climate negotiators, experts from the trade and climate change community, civil society actors and the private sector in an informal and non-negotiating setting.
Details
Rapidly escalating international concern on climate change and energy security has catapulted the issue of trade and climate change to the top of the global policy agenda. The international trade system is by definition made up of constraining or enabling regulations, which have the potential to play a critical role in the global transition to a low-carbon economy. In the context of climate change at least two dimensions are relevant to current trade policy and regulatory systems. Climate change, in itself, through its biophysical impacts, will necessarily affect sourcing, land use, production and trade flows, and most likely, terms of trade and competitiveness. Second, addressing climate change both to mitigate emissions as well as to adapt to change will require major transformations and change in production and trade patterns whether it’s done through national and sub‐national strategies, including non-statutory initiatives aimed at altering behaviour and re-defining what a society consumes; or, through agreed international cooperative action, such as in the context of UNFCCC. Hence, the concern for both climate and trade policy, is how to steer a global and local transition of such magnitude, without compromising -or at least minimally-development and growth prospects; and in the way, how to manage impacts on competitiveness in an equitable manner.
The ICTSD Trade Day explored the most pressing challenges at the core of the trade and climate change debate. It provided a space for constructive interaction among climate negotiators, experts from the trade and climate change community, civil society actors and the private sector in an informal and non-negotiating setting. After an opening plenary session the meeting was organised in two parallel roundtables dealing respectively with competitiveness and carbon leakage; and clean energy generation. In the afternoon, another set of parallel roundtables addressed issues related to aid for trade and climate financing mechanisms; and bunker fuels.