IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/envlaw/v34y2022i2p245-267..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Regulating Trade in Forest-Risk Commodities: Two Cheers for the European Union

Author

Listed:
  • Gracia Marín Durán
  • Joanne Scott

Abstract

The European Union (EU) is a major importer of forest-risk commodities (FRCs) and thereby bears significant responsibility for the dangerous trend of global deforestation and forest degradation. On 17 November 2021, the European Commission took a courageous first step towards reducing the EU’s global deforestation footprint, by putting forward a legislative proposal to regulate trade in FRCs. The article analyses this proposal and explains why we consider it to be necessary and justified. Although we identify some important shortcomings in the proposal, particularly in relation to the protection of land tenure rights, we argue that the EU has a moral responsibility to avoid being complicit in the destruction of forests worldwide. We also suggest that the proposed regulation needs to be better designed to be compatible with the law of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and notably with regards to its country benchmarking system and cooperation with affected exporting countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Gracia Marín Durán & Joanne Scott, 2022. "Regulating Trade in Forest-Risk Commodities: Two Cheers for the European Union," Journal of Environmental Law, Oxford University Press, vol. 34(2), pages 245-267.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:envlaw:v:34:y:2022:i:2:p:245-267.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jel/eqac002
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:envlaw:v:34:y:2022:i:2:p:245-267.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jel .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.