CEC Releases Report on Measuring NAFTA-Environment Links

The North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) today released a report on how to measure the connections between NAFTA and environmental quality in North America.

The 384-page report, Assessing Environmental Effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): An Analytic Framework (Phase II) and Issue Studies, is the most detailed effort yet to develop a means of measuring the ecological impacts of the 1994 trade liberalization agreement.

The methodology developed provides a way to sort through the complex economic, social and technological variables that link economic activity to environmental impacts—both positive and negative. "The CEC is the first institution to put forward a rigorous framework for understanding the linkages between trade liberalization and environmental quality," stated Janine Ferretti, Interim Executive Director of the CEC Secretariat.

According to Sarah Richardson, head of the CEC's NAFTA Environmental Effects program, "we are able to identify and assess the importance of some key linkages between economic activity generated by a comprehensive trade agreement such as NAFTA—that not only liberalizes trade, but also includes important investment provisions and institutional components—and the environment. It will be some time before the information is available and the analysis sufficiently developed to allow one to take a broad, across-the-board measure of environmental impacts."

The technique for identifying and measuring environmental impacts was tested on issues within the energy and agriculture sectors: maize production in Mexico, intensive cattle feedlot production in the United States and Canada, and electricity production in the three NAFTA countries. These issue studies are included in the report.

This report was made public by the CEC Council—Administrator Carol M. Browner of the US Environmental Protection Agency; Julia Carabias, Mexican Secretary for Environment, Natural Resources and Fisheries; and Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart. It marks the second phase of the NAFTA Effects research project, and represents the work of dozens of international experts.

A revised version of the analytical framework, incorporating comments from an extensive peer review, will be released in June at which time institutions and organizations throughout North America will be encouraged to use it to measure trade-environment linkages.

The CEC was established by Canada, Mexico and the United States in 1994 to foster regional cooperation on important environmental matters, address environment-related trade issues and promote effective enforcement of environmental law in North America.