Climate Change and Biodiversity as an Essential Element of EU External Trade Relations FTAs: Legal Effects and Policy Implications in EUCentral America Trade and Sustainable Development Relations

Obligations on climate change and biodiversity are increasingly evident not just in the European Union’s (EU’s) environmental policy and cooperation, including through the rapid ratification of and attempts to strengthen implementation and compliance with the Paris Agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), but also in other economic relationships of the EU. While sustainable development has been an objective of the EU’s international trade agreements since 1994, efforts to address climate change and biodiversity originally appeared almost as an afterthought in these agreements. This article documents a fundamental shift in the EU’s external relations through the meaningful inclusion of cooperation on climate change and biodiversity in the EU’s trade and investment agreements, and provides an analysis of the legal and policy consequences. It argues that including global response to climate action (and potentially biodiversity) as an essential element in a bilateral or inter-regional economic relationship changes the nature of that relationship. The Paris Agreement and the new Kunming- Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) contain long and medium-term objectives that all trading partners will want to achieve. While the legal text is designed not to be used in practice, the elevation of both climate change now and biodiversity in the future to an essential element, fulfils an important signalling function that permeates the entire trade relationship and has the potential to change its basis.