Last updated: 09/12/2021

Trade can have multiple benefits, such as offering a better variety and more affordable goods to consumers, enhancing production efficiency, and generating economic growth and development. Specifically, trade can have positive impacts on the environment by fostering a more economically efficient allocation and use of available resources (thus making production less wasteful), promoting the dissemination of clean standards as well as the development of, and access to, green goods and technologies. Furthermore, trade rules and agreements often contain sustainability provisions that promote environmental standards, which in turn generates incentives for businesses to adopt cleaner production processes and technologies.

However, trade can also have various direct and indirect negative impacts on biodiversity. On the one hand, the transport of goods has a direct impact on biodiversity within the EU territory via the importation of pathogens and exotic species that can become invasive and threaten EU biodiversity. On the other hand, trade also impacts global biodiversity via EU imports that contribute to ecosystem degradation and fragmentation overseas, which is particularly worrying for EU imports from tropical, biodiversity-rich countries. The illegal, direct importation into the EU of endangered species or their derived products – such as ivory – further threatens global biodiversity.

The EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 stresses the importance of addressing the conservation of global biodiversity. From the trade point of view, tackling this challenge requires an assessment of the impact of EU trade agreements on global biodiversity and introducing or modifying policy instruments in order to alleviate undesirable consequences. This implies a need to track supply chains, to assess the direct and indirect drivers of biodiversity loss in specific contexts, such as for example land-use change associated with the production of traded commodities in lower-income countries, and to measure the impacts on biodiversity with appropriate metrics. Although this is inherently complex, it is necessary in order to enable effective trade policy provisions that can be implemented and monitored. This is also important to allow investors and businesses to consider their impacts and dependencies on biodiversity. 

To that purpose, the European Commission, through the Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity, aims at collecting, synthesising and communicating relevant knowledge on biodiversity and trade.