OECD: Environment in Investment Agreements

This new working paper titled “Environmental Concerns in International Investment Agreements - A Survey,” establishes a statistical portrait of governments’ investment treaty practices in 1,623 international investment agreements (IIAs) and finds that over time, more treaties contain environmental language, and of the 1,623 treaties reviewed, only about 8% of the reference environmental concerns. It underscores that wide variations in the content of such language exist, both across countries and across time, but that the issues raised have hardly evolved at all, with neither climate change nor biodiversity issues represented in the sample, suggesting “a limited exchange between the investment and environmental policy communities.”