| With the development of economic globalization, the process of internationalinvestment liberalization has also been constantly deepened. International investmenthas become the indispensable element to promote the global economic development.However, while countries gain economic benefits in international investment, theyhave to pay considerable attention to the negative effects which are brought about byinvestment activities to the global environment. On the one hand, enterprises ofdeveloped countries always transfer the highly polluting industries to developingcountries in the hope of avoiding their own countries’ strict environmental protectionstandards and reducing cost spent on environmental protection. On the other hand,developing countries always choose to lower down their domestic environmentalstandards in order to improve their competitiveness in attracting foreigninvestment.These phenomena indicate that it is necessary to bring in environmentalprotection rules in international investment agreements.In recent years, all kinds of international investment agreements have to someextent brought in environmental rules. There were some international investmentarbitration cases relating to environmental protection. By means of this essay, theauthor firstly tries to encompass three aspects, namely the existence, reason andimportance of environmental issues in international investment, to clarify thenecessity of adding environmental provisions in international investment agreements.And then the author analyzes the main environmental provisions in internationalinvestment agreements and the different roles they play in environmental protection.What’s more, the author sheds light on the relationship between investment protectionprovisions and environmental protection provisions based on arbitration cases. Finally,this paper comes up with some advice for perfecting the environmental provisions andcoordinating international and environmental protection. |
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