Greening regional trade agreements : subsidies related to energy and environmental goods

Many regional trade agreements (RTAs) contain chapters and articles that are environmentally specific. However, Parties can elect to more broadly incorporate environmental objectives in their RTAs to address their environmental concerns in such agreements. This report investigates in what ways RTAs could incorporate environmental objectives in chapters and articles related to subsidies for energy and environmental goods. It highlights the current state of play in incorporating provisions related to environmentally related subsidies in RTAs, and also illustrates possible ways to incorporate environmental objectives in RTAs based on existing practice and information. Regional disciplines on subsidies could be considered in RTAs with respect to the Parties’ environmental objectives in several ways, such as ensuring non-discriminatory measures, agreeing on a set of non-actionable subsidies, committing to phase-out certain subsidies, and securing greater transparency.