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United Nations Environment Programme
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UNEP will be at the WTO Public Forum 2022.

The Public Forum is the WTO’s largest annual outreach event. It provides a unique platform for heads of states, parliamentarians, business people, students, academics and civil society to come together and debate a wide range of trade and development topics.

This year's Public Forum will look at how trade can contribute to post-pandemic economic recovery. The Forum will examine, in particular, how trade rules can be strengthened, and government policies improved to create a more resilient, sustainable and inclusive trading system. The Forum has three subthemes: Leveraging technology for an inclusive recovery; Delivering a trade agenda for a sustainable future; Framing the future of trade.

28 Sep 2022

Time & Place
Event Details
15:45
Championing the Role of Smallholders in Trade: How to Make Agriculture Commodity Trade More Equitable and Sustainable Sustainable agricultural commodity trade that ensures fair returns to farmers while reducing impacts on forests and biodiversity is a topic that’s front and centre globally. However, the necessary transition is hampered by barriers in key areas: data, traceability and standards; awareness and technical capacity; collaboration and participatory approaches; and policy and regulatory incentives. Join us to discuss and explore how these barriers could be overcome, including how the work on sustainable trade at the WTO could support this.
This workshop session is organized by the Trade, Development and the Environment Hub, funded by UK Research and Innovation, which is an impact-focused collaboration that is unique in its approach of linking international trade systems to social and environmental impacts in an interdisciplinary manner. We will use an original documentary filmed by the TRADE Hub, focused on cocoa and palm oil smallholders in Cameroon, as a case study for the workshop.
17:30
How can trade support pathways to adaptation and the transition to a low-carbon future? Trading in the low carbon transition requires a critical understanding of several aspects, e.g., the “what to trade” based on changing consumer tastes and preferences; the “how to trade” based on the carbon intensity of the transportation and distribution networks; and the “who to trade with” based on the emerging trade and climate-change related policies by markets. This session seeks to shed light on all these aspects while placing emphasis on the soft and hard reforms needed to ensure carbon competitiveness and facilitate adaptation and resilience that is needed to weather climate change impacts. To understand the social impacts that need to be taken into consideration when designing inclusive policies, this session will also present some estimated results of the distributional impacts of the emerging trade and climate change related policies.

29 Sep 2022

Time & Place
Event Details
11:30
Enabling Sustainable and Inclusive Trade: Data Science Solutions for Public-Private Partnership and Innovative Transparency Mechanisms To turn ambition for a sustainable and inclusive recovery into concrete action, decision-makers must obtain and process data beyond their usual domains in a systematic manner. With transparency over the connection between supply chains and environmental impacts, governments can know which goods, services and knowledge are needed for the recovery, or how to facilitate access to them. Similarly, for businesses to adapt to a low-carbon future, they must understand the risks associated with the three planetary crises and trade trends for green action.

This session will translate the needs of stakeholders into data science questions for digitally-enabled business ecosystems and transparency mechanism design. This will elaborate user needs for connecting environmental monitoring, value chain traceability and economic policy transparency in information flows for climate, nature and trade governance, to be followed by practical solutions in the form of use case demonstrations of data systems, business feasibility analysis and policy recommendations.

30 Sep 2022

Time & Place
Event Details
14:00
Leveraging International Organisations for Sustainable and Inclusive Trade: From Theory to Practice The session will reflect on the findings of TPH’s report, comparing recent developments and innovative practices in trade and sustainable provisions. International organisations have been at the forefront and initiators of sustainable development issues. The different conventions and agreements have laid the general frameworks for sustainability objectives across the globe. With more and more trade agreements incorporating references to international conventions or multilateral environmental agreements, trade partner countries who have not implemented them are incentivised to come on board, but the responsibility of implementation poses a challenge for many developing countries. International organisations are often called upon to assist when trade agreements incorporate environmental and labour provisions. There are multiple channels for them to bring tangible results: by enhancing civil society participation, combining cooperation and incentives, as well as defining clear roadmaps. This session brings together experts from academia, policy making, and international organisations.
14:00
Trade Policy and a Circular Economy for Plastics: Insights from Developing Countries This working session will examine ways in which trade and investment policy can expedite the transition to a circular economy for plastics in developing countries. Especially for developing countries, these interventions can ensure that circularity in plastics is not at the cost of income and employment growth, but is rather something that creates new economic opportunities, beyond addressing plastic’s environmental concerns. Focusing on GPAP’s stakeholder-driven work in Ghana and South Africa, and ongoing activities in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the discussion will centre upon the challenges on the path to plastics circularity that are endemic to developing countries, and how deliberate trade policy interventions can transform these challenges into opportunities for sustainable economic development and positive environmental outcomes. In addition, the working session will assess if learnings from these countries are transversal, and to what extent they can be scaled up and replicated in other developing countries.
15:45
Trade and Biodiversity: Taking Stock after COP 15 At a time when biodiversity loss is experiencing an unprecedented crisis in terms of its scope and speed, several international, national, public and private initiatives aim to better articulate international trade and biodiversity conservation. Although somewhat complex, the interactions between trade and biodiversity are numerous and well documented. What is the state of science on trade and biodiversity? How can international discussions at the UN, the CBD or the WTO help to reduce the negative impacts of trade on biodiversity while strengthening its positive contributions? This working session, co-organised by the French and Dutch delegations to the WTO, aims to take stock of this crucial issue for a sustainable trade agenda, following the MC12 and the CBD COP 15.
Did you know?
Only 12 per cent of cities have air quality measures that meet WHO standards.

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