- Firm
- Provisional
- Coming soon
- Revised
- Firm
- Provisional
- Coming soon
- Revised
How well are we doing?
Editor's note: We have recently refreshed and updated our data for all countries on the platform, as we revised the 21 policies we cover.
Greening the global trading regime obviously involves both action at national-level between, and multilateral reform to steer the rules of the game in greener directions. Our data and framework is focusing on what countries are doing individually, and how this might tip the scales and add up to momentum for greening of international trade architecture.
Most of the countries covered by the tracker are showing low-to mid-range performance in green trade practices, with only a minority of countries showing strong performance. EU countries, largely driven by the European Green Deal, are increasingly engaging with green trade measures, though there remain areas for improvement, particularly in ensuring just transitions around spillover effects on emerging and global-southern economies.
However, leading the way on green trade practices are New Zealand and Costa Rica. New Zealand and Costa Rica’s high score are unsurprising given their role as two of the four founding members of the landmark 2025 Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability (ACCTS) that represents the highest standard for green trade, going beyond traditional FTAs to directly integrate trade and climate policy, and include liberalizing environmental goods and services as well as a legally binding framework to address harmful fossil fuel subsidies.
Elsewhere, adoption has been limited. As a developing economy with a strong emphasis on attracting foreign direct investment for its new oil and gas sector, Senegal faces structural challenges as well as challenges in adopting and enforcing higher environmental standards. Saudi Arabia has no national carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, nor has it established a comprehensive policy for liberalising tariffs on environmental goods and services.
The question is no longer if the world will decarbonise, but how and where — and whether we can do it through cooperation rather than fragmentation.
About this policy
Trade makes up a significant portion of economic activity globally, and how green goods and services should be integrated into the global trading regime has become an increasingly important area of policy debate. Additionally, environmental regulations that set national standards and reduce pollution will inevitably have cross-border effects - shaping economic incentives, and privileging access to markets.
The simple principle that trade policy should be an enabler, not a barrier, to the green economy transition implies a much more complex set of Green Trade Practices that are now being explored by governments of many stripes. Green trade encompasses alignment with existing multilateral market-access obligations, innovation in just transition measures to support developing economies in transition, attention to value-chains around key inputs and transition minerals for clean-tech, and the political and economic spillover effects from national-level policies like carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes.
Shaping trade patterns and business investment decisions in alignment with sustainable development has been a long term objective of UN and multilateral efforts via the World Trade Organization (WTO). The difficulty of making much progress is what has led some governments to strike out with green trade pacts of their own, explore carbon-border tariffs, and collaborate on green taxonomies to better identify green compliant trade. The practices we survey under this section also show the emergence of 'green protectionism' by those keen to control green trade (or use green principles as a pretext for non-environmental trade objectives), and proliferation of climate concepts such as 'just transition' and 'common but differentiated responsibility' into shaping the emerging trade architecture.