Commission for Environmental Cooperation

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The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) is an international organization created by Canada, Mexico and the United States under the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC). The CEC was established to address regional environmental concerns, help prevent potential trade and environmental conflicts, and to promote the effective enforcement of environmental law. The Agreement complements the environmental provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Environmental Assessment of NAFTA

The CEC was designed in part to investigate the environmental impact of this first regional trade agreement between a developing country and two developed countries. A notable concern was that North American industry would be drawn to jurisdictions with lax environmental laws or weak enforcement, leading to a “race to the bottom” in standards or enforcement. The CEC’s mandate therefore includes an ongoing ex post environmental assessment of NAFTA. The CEC has held four symposia concerning the environmental impacts of NAFTA and has commissioned 47 papers on this subject. In keeping with the CEC’s overall strategy of transparency and public involvement, the CEC commissioned these papers from leading independent experts ^[1].

The Framework for the Assessment

CEC created a framework for conducting environmental analysis of NAFTA, one of the first ex post frameworks for the environmental assessment of trade liberalization. The framework was designed to produce a focused and systematic body of evidence concerning initial hypotheses about the environmental effects of NAFTA, hypotheses such as: NAFTA will create a “race to the bottom” in environmental regulation among the three countries or NAFTA will pressure governments to increase their environmental protection mechanisms ^[2].

The Conclusions of the Assessment

Overall, none of these hypotheses were confirmed. NAFTA did not present a systemic threat to the North American environment, as was originally feared. NAFTA-related environmental threats instead occurred in specific areas where government environmental policy, infrastructure, or mechanisms, were unprepared for the increasing scale of production under trade liberalization. In some cases, government policy was neglected in the wake of trade liberalization; in other cases, NAFTA’s measures for investment protection, such as Chapter 11, and measures against non-tariff trade barriers, threatened to discourage more vigorous environmental policy ^[3]. The most serious overall increases in pollution due to NAFTA were found in the base metals sector, the Mexican petroleum sector, and the transportation equipment sector in the United States and Mexico, but not in Canada ^[4].

Ecozones and ecoregions

Part of the commission's work included the creation of a system of ecozones and ecoregions covering the continent, which is distinct from that used by the World Wildlife Fund. Although different names are used, the ecozone system used in Canada, which is used by Environment Canada, the federal ministry of environment, has the same boundaries and parameters as those used by the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States, which uses the term Level I ecoregion to mean what "ecozone" does in Canada.

References

External links

• CEC.org