Foreword to Book Developing a Carbon Market: EU ETS Implementation in Germany and Its Transfer Potential for Brazil

While global attention is focused on fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change remains a defining, long-term challenge that requires policies to create sustainable economies. This challenging task is increasingly gaining attention among policymakers worldwide, since climate change is rapidly becoming a top priority in national politics and international trade remains an essential part of the global economy. To address climate change, the international community created the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992. It became the main forum of climate change negotiations and in 1997 the Kyoto Protocol was adopted and set legally binding greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) reduction targets for industrialized countries. In 2019, many governments began the push for net-zero emissions with national targets and new policy strategies.Now is the time to determine whether the carbon-market approach, as the one analyzed by Natascha Trennepohl in her book, could be conciliated with the bottom-up international climate regime. Trade law could be touted as the solution to legitimize the existence of climate clubs and their direct implications on trade rules. In this sense, climate change law and trade law can be mutually supportive. Indeed, Article 3.5 of the UNFCCC is not only providing for state cooperation in fighting climate change, but also averts from potential restrictions on international trade, leaving a window open for unilateral measures. With international cooperation falling short on providing satisfying results, states tend to resort to unilateral action, frequently in the form of trade measures.