ABSTRACT
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is leading the way in many areas, notably civil society participation in international governance, procedures to help governments ensure their own environmental laws are adequately enforced, and the need for sophisticated ongoing sustainability assessments of trade liberalisation. Mexico's growing enthusiasm for the full NAFTA principle of 'sustainable development', the accumulating evidence of its benefits, and the ongoing effort to defend and improve its ecological and social protections are potent talking points for the broader trade liberalisation debate. One of the most and far-reaching efforts to assess the ex post environmental effects of trade can be found in the application of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) analytical framework to several case studies in North America. The proliferation of environmental and sustainability indicator reports in North America offers a potentially rich source of data for assessing the environmental effects of trade at the local level.
