Analsis Of WTO Environmental Rules’ Problems And Its Applicable Development In Low-Carbon Era

With the rapid development of industrialization and trade liberalization, globalwarming and environmental damage are getting worse. However, environment is thebasic condition for living of human being, economic growth and trade. Because ofthat, environmental protection is setting off another wave when trade liberalizationgives a wave to international community. Under this context, how to keep the balancebetween trade liberalization and environmental protection has become one of thefocuses in international discussions. Sustainable Development is not only the maineconomic development strategy of many states, but also one of the purposes of WTO.WTO is currently the largest and most authoritative international economicorganizations, which main aims at protecting international trade liberalization andestablishing an international trade order. Environmental Protection gives a beat toWTO trading system, in face of this change, WTO has to put trade and environmentalissues into its system and tries its best to coordinate the balance of trade andenviroment. At last, it summarizes a series of environmental rules. However, theWTO environmental rules, due to their own shortcomings, don’t give their functionsof environmental protection into full as it should do. What’s worse, theenvironment-related trade disputes in the international community are increasingcaused by countries with higher environmental standards abused the rules. At present,WTO environmental rules can’t effectively solve environmental problems in its tradesystem. What’s more, low-carbon economy is the general trend after Climate ChangeConference in Copenhagen. From this background, many articles analyze theseproblems how to coordinate the relationship between WTO and multilateralenvironmental agreements (MEAS) and how to apply the WTO environmental rules.The author on the basis of previous studies analyzes the WTO environmentalrules. This paper is composed of five sections. The first section analyzes theintroduction of WTO environmental rules; The second section analyzes therepresentative theory of the relationship between trade and the environment:Externality of environmental cost theory, Nash equilibrium theory and Kuznets theory,introduces interact relation of trade and environment in the practice, puts forward fiveeffective methods which coordinate the relationship between trade and environment:externalization of environmental cost, coordination of international environmental lawand WTO legal system, paying attention to science and technology, enhancing theawareness of environmental protection, improving the global carbon market; The third section tries to using the comparative analyze method, case analyze method,historical analyze method to research WTO environmental rules to analyze their maincontent and the existing problems, the sources of law; The fourth section analyzes theapplicable conditions of the environmental rules and its new development; The fifthsection gives some legal thinking of environmental legislation of China under theWTO environmental rules. It is recommended to establish a low-carbon and matchingsustainable development environmental legislation system and improve our country’sforeign trade law in order to actively respond to environmental barriers.