The working paper titled “Environmental Concerns in International Investment Agreements - A Survey,” finds that over time, more treaties contain environmental language; although and of the 1,623 treaties reviewed, only about 8% of the reference environmental concerns.
June 2011: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has published a working paper titled “Environmental Concerns in International Investment Agreements – A Survey,” which establishes a statistical portrait of governments’ investment treaty practices in 1,623 international investment agreements (IIAs).
The paper, authored by by Kathryn Gordon and Joachim Pohl, discusses how IIAs not only define commitments on investment protection, but also have frequently been sources of controversy and investor-State disputes on environmental regulation when environmental wording is used in IIAs. It 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.” [Publication: Environmental Concerns in International Investment Agreements – A Survey]