The paper Trade and Climate Change: Policy and Economic Implications for South Africa is a scoping assessment of the inter-relationship between international trade and climate change negotiations as it affects policy development in South Africa. The paper highlights two key variants of measures which pose a challenge to both these negotiations, specifically border carbon adjustments and the liberalization of trade in environmental goods and services.
The paper finds that while free trade in green industry products may be encouraged under a global climate agreement, it should not be reasonably required. In addition, for Border Carbon Adjustments (BCAs) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the authors recommend that BCAs be considered an issue best left to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to judge as fair or not. At the same time, the authors propose a multilateral climate agreement under the UNFCCC which considers three agreements/provisions to mitigate the negative impact of response measures on non-Annex 1 countries.