Arbitral Tribunals and Sustainable Development

The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) has published "International Investment Law and Sustainable Development: Key cases from 2000-2010," reviewing select decisions issued from 2000-2010 by arbitral tribunals in investor–State arbitrations. It highlights how arbitral decisions, including those by the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), affect the scope of the treaties and may impact on the will and ability of governments to advance their domestic sustainable development goals and policies.

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.”