Many trade agreements devote an entire chapter to environmental protection. Some of their environmental clauses are even more specific and restrictive than those of multilateral environmental agreements. At the same time, trade agreements are often criticized for their harmful effects on the environment. While the interplay between trade and the environmental is becoming increasingly controversial, we lack a deep understanding of the development and variance of environmental provisions in trade agreements across themes, time periods as well as regions. To fill this gap, Prof. Jean-Frédéric Morin developed the Trend & Environment Database (TREND). Covering 280 different types of environmental clauses in 688 different trade agreements, TREND is by far the most comprehensive and reliable dataset on this matter.

The German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) recently made available a user-friendly online tool to explore TREND: TRENDanalytics.info. The interactive world map of TREND analytics provides an overview of the number of environmental provisions by country in the chosen period: the greener a country bubble, the more environment-related provisions it has signed per trade agreement. The size of the bubble is based on the total number of environment-related provisions the respective country has included in all its PTAs. You can also zoom into specific agreements, countries and down to the level of individual environmental provisions. Watch this video to learn more on how to use TREND analytics. TREND analytics has been developed in the context of the Klimalog project, finance by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).