Launching a climate-compatible trade strategy: a view from the inside

We wanted to share this blog with you looking back at some of the work undertaken by Jude Kirton-Darling (one of our wonderful Trustees) on her work to develop a trade policy that reflects and addresses the climate situation we are in. We’re hoping this work will be picked up by policy makers in the new year.

Trade justice and climate justice are integrally entwined. As a trade unionist, I’m deeply conscious that environmental damage often accompanies social exploitation - our current economic model fails to properly reflect either the environmental or social impacts in the costs of goods and services. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the climate crisis. Climate chaos is increasingly visible around the world from devastating droughts to floods, every corner of the world is being impacted. Keeping the chaos limited depends on radical societal thinking and action: changing our patterns of production and consumption, with significant challenges for the existing model of trade flows, global supply chains and economic relations. There is no ‘business as usual’ scenario available.

Unfortunately, our economic and trade policy rule-making has yet to catch up with the scale and pace of climate action needed. This has been recognised in the High Court ruling against the UK’s current climate strategy, which was deemed unlawful. Reconciling the objective of keeping ‘1.5 degrees alive’ demands that trade policymakers and negotiators up their game, whether at multilateral level frameworks or in bilateral relations. It also demands a concerted open, engaged public debate about our future UK trade policy in the post-Brexit context. In many ways, the UK has become a rule-taker rather than a rule-maker, but Brexit may offers space for the UK to bring new ideas to the table – if there is the imagination and political will.

Over the past few months I’ve been honoured to be part of the UK Climate and Trade Commission convened by the Trade Justice Movement and Queen Mary University of London, which has aimed to bring that fresh thinking and practical recommendations for how to build a climate-fit trade policy. The 14 Commissioners bring with them a mass of cross-sectoral technical, and political and stakeholder experience and knowledge – and also of working alongside the vast range of stakeholders affected - , which has made our discussions extremely thought-provoking and challenging. There have been large swathes of consensus but acute points of division. Despite this, we have pulled together 20 recommendations for UK trade policymakers which I hope will be taken into consideration.

The overarching recommendation is that we need an explicit and publicly available national trade policy strategy.  Social acceptance and democratic participation around these policy choices is vital – the trade-offs and competing objectives must be reconciled, and these Trade-offs need to be openly discussed. This trade policy must interlink with a domestic industrial policy strategy and Just Transition framework as part of UK climate action, and international development and capacity-building measures, to ensure that we avoid entrenching the inequalities of our current economic model as we fight the existential challenge of climate change.