ICC recommendations on trade and climate change

To maintain progress achieved, governments should focus on ways to secure the mutually reinforcing benefits of a strengthened rules-based multilateral trading system and a new long-term and effective global framework for combating climate change that includes all major emitters. They should not allow themselves to be side-tracked in this momentous task by border measures that would undermine intergovernmental cooperation and damage international trade.

Proposals based on unilateral trade measures attempt to address pressing and challenging political and economic pressures. They seek to create a “level playing field” for domestic industries subject to climate change policies, by targeting competitors of these industries in other countries not subject to such policies, and seeking to compel them to bear part of the cost of such policies. These proposals are motivated by a desire, to offset what is seen as the competitive advantage enjoyed by industries in countries that are not subject to the same level of domestic climate change policies, whether arising from international, regional or domestic climate policies. Policy makers also express concern about the relocation of energy intensive industries – a phenomenon often referred to as carbon leakage -- and thus suggest that such measures are needed to preserve the environmental integrity of domestic/regional schemes. ICC believes that these challenges can be addressed in other ways that work within a trade-climate change synergy.