Trade, transboundary impacts and the implementation of SDG 12

Rob Amos,Emily Lydgate

doi:10.1007/s11625-019-00713-9

Abstract

The 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were developed to ‘transform our world’. Yet critics argue that the concept of sustainable development serves to maintain an unsustainable status quo, or provide a positive gloss on a terminal conflict between its ‘pillars’: environmental protection, economic growth and social welfare. In this article, we examine this tension with respect to the implementation of SDG 12 in the European Union. SDG 12 calls for responsible consumption and production, which necessitates reconciling, or ‘decoupling’, economic growth and environmental degradation: the core of sustainable development. Initial examination reveals that the largest implementation gap is among high-consuming countries, including those of the EU, the focus of our article, who are failing to account for transboundary impacts of products consumed domestically. This shortcoming, facilitated by the flexibility of the SDG ‘global target, national action’ approach, undermines the achievement of other environmental SDGs relating to biodiversity and climate, among others. Yet, as compared to other EU approaches to addressing transboundary environmental harm from trade in existing Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), which we examine, the global focus and breadth of SDG 12 offers transformative potential. Ultimately, even if the three pillars of sustainable development are not ‘rebalanced’ toward environmental conservation, they can provide a construct for examining interactions and trade-offs between goals. Simply taking account of transboundary consumption, as SDG 12 indicators call for, would encourage more effective cooperation to help producing countries address environmental problems that result from production for export through impact assessment and enforcement.

Highlights

EU procedural requirements, such as Sustainability Impact Assessment of trade agreements, are promising as an approach to increase synergies between SDGs, but are currently limited in scope and effectiveness
Despite the growth and increasing interconnectedness of global supply chains, wealthy, high-consuming countries have neglected to account for transboundary impacts of their domestic consumption in the context of SDG 12 on responsible production and consumption (Bertelsmann Stiftung, Handled by John Thompson, Institute of Development Studies, Rural Futures, United Kingdom.SDSN 2018)
We argue that SDG 12 provides an opportunity which is largely being missed: for governments to address the considerable gaps in these current mechanisms, and to account for these harms more systematically

Summary

Introduction

EU procedural requirements, such as Sustainability Impact Assessment of trade agreements, are promising as an approach to increase synergies between SDGs, but are currently limited in scope and effectiveness. The failure to account for transboundary impacts of domestic consumption leads consuming countries to undermine the achievement of other SDGs. There is a growing body of academic literature which documents the environmental impacts of international supply chains (connecting these to the need for a more robust approach to the SDGs, see e.g. Wiedmann and Lenzen 2018).

Results

Conclusion