By Kanyshai Butun
ISTANBUL (AA) - The free trade agreement concluded between the EU and India on Jan. 27 emphasizes cooperation and dialogue for environmental issues instead of enforceable targets, experts told the London non-profit Dialogue Earth on Friday.
Experts underlined that the trade components of the deal are backed by binding commitments, penalties and enforcement mechanisms, meanwhile, provisions on climate action and environmental protection remain significantly weaker, relying largely on consultation rather than compliance.
Aparna Roy, fellow and lead for climate change and energy at the Observer Research Foundation think tank, Centre for New Economic Diplomacy, outlined that the environmental and climate commitments are mostly focused within the chapter on trade and sustainable development, and framed around cooperation.
Bur the trade provisions covering aspects including goods, services, competition, subsidies and intellectual property are framed in enforceable language, she said.
“Politically, softer environmental language is often a deliberate design choice to prevent trade negotiations from stalling, particularly when partners have divergent development priorities or regulatory capacities,” said Roy.
To leave space for potential diplomatic maneuvering, environmental clauses in trade agreements often favor flexibility over ambition, she said, which in turn undermines the ability to tackle systemic challenges such as emissions leakage, biodiversity loss and carbon-intensive cross-border value chains.
She added that trade provisions fall under the dispute resolution mechanism, which can be triggered by violations of tariff, investment or market-access rules, meanwhile, environmental relies largely on dialogue and consultation.
“This asymmetry reflects the fact that trade obligations are treated as justiciable economic commitments, while environmental provisions are often positioned as normative or aspirational,” said Roy.
Debarshee Dasgupta, a doctoral researcher on environmental and water governance at SOAS University of London, underlined that the presence of consultation mechanisms and monitoring committees does not automatically translate into implementation of their output on the ground.
“While such mechanisms create space for dialogue, the extent to which their recommendations are acted upon is not always guaranteed,” he said.
Roy underlined that the agreement is unlikely to function as a transformative climate instrument, saying its value lies in enabling cooperation through aligning standards, improving transparency, facilitating clean technology cooperation, and embedding climate considerations within supply chains rather than directly enforcing emissions reductions.
She said the agreement could help align regulations on sustainable manufacturing, carbon accounting and environmental reporting, stressing that meaningful climate action will still depend more on domestic policies, public investment and multilateral climate finance than on trade-based enforcement.
On 17 June 2022, the European Union relaunched negotiations with India for a Free Trade Agreement, and launched separate negotiations for an Investment Protection Agreement and an Agreement on Geographical Indications. Negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement concluded on 27 January 2026.
The EU is India's largest trading partner, accounting for €120 billion worth of trade in goods in 2024 or 11.5% of total Indian trade. India is the EU’s 9th largest trading partner, accounting for 2.4% of the EU's total trade in goods in 2024. Trade in services between the EU and India reached €59.7 billion in 2023, up from €30.4 billion in 2020.