This event will present the findings of the Villars Framework for a Sustainable Global Trade System, the culmination of a two-year multistakeholder project on Remaking Global Trade for a Sustainable Future. The event will focus on the Villars Framework’s recommendations for regearing trade rules and institutions to promote more sustainable consumption patterns and contribute to a decarbonized, biodiversity-friendly global economy, with a view towards key outcomes and action items for the WTO Ministerial in February 2024. Items for discussion include: 

• Ensuring that the Abu Dhabi Declaration reiterates the trade system’s fundamental focus on sustainable development and encourages WTO members to align their trade policies with their climate-related obligations, including their Nationally Determined Contributions and climate finance commitments under the 2015 Paris Agreement. 

• Creating conditions that allow less industrialized countries to thrive in the emerging sustainability oriented trade system.

• Developing a new approach to subsidies that considers their sustainability impacts alongside trade distorting effects. 

• Establishing an inclusive process for setting sustainability standards for traded goods. 

• Considering the potential for a revitalized sustainable goods/services/technology initiative to eliminate tariffs and other barriers to trade in factors essential to sustainable development.

• Identifying and promoting digital tools and information technologies that can advance sustainable production and engagement by less industrialized countries in e-commerce.

• Launching workstreams to address the diversity of national climate change strategies that are emerging and to minimize the trade tensions created by these strategies, for example by working to establish agreed foundations for border carbon adjustment mechanisms.

• Initiating a WTO governance and institutional reform process to enhance the agility and effectiveness of trade system deliberation and decision-making and to create new processes and mechanisms to ensure a more inclusive, just, and people-centered trade system.