Concerted Action on Trade & Environment (CAT&E)

CAT&E is a European-wide network of scientists working on inter-linkages between trade, environment and sustainable development.

CAT&E brings together researchers from more than 20 institutions all over Europe, who are focusing their work on international trade and environment. The project puts its primary focus on the environmental dimension of trade policy, but will also consider the interactions between trade and social policy concerns that can impact on consideration of trade and environment linkages. Thus also trade and sustainable development issues are addressed. CAT&E responds to the need to develop dialogue between European researchers in this field in order to identify emerging results, consider research hypotheses and strategies and foster productive dialogue with policy makers. CAT&E, and its projected events, is structured around a series of substantive questions. While this agenda may evolve over the course of the Concerted Action, it considers the following issues:

• Trade and agriculture

• Trade in services

• Subsidies

• Investment

• Intellectual property rights (TRIPS)

• Trade and development

• Trade and Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs)

• Trade, environment and labour/human rights/public health

• Institutional issues (dispute settlement, transparency and participation)

• Sustainability impact assessments (SIAs)

Six international meetings (among those three conferences open to the public) within the three-year running time of the project provide a unique forum for exchanging results and opinions between the members of the consortium as well as with invited stakeholders (policy makers, business representatives etc.).