Since the Industrial Revolution, there have been various natural disasters, which are difficult to see as natural phenomenon, due to the progress of development and various industrial activities worldwide. As global warming, climate change, extinction of various animals and plants, desertification and destruction of tropical rainforest, natural disasters directly linked to the survival of human beings have occurred, and countries around the world are trying to understand the importance of nature and environment. These natural environmental problems are not solved by the efforts of individual countries, but all of the international community should be aware of environmental problems and have to cooperate.
The efforts to harmonize environment and development, which have been discussed since 1970, include a variety of environmental declarations including the Stockholm Declaration in 1972, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 (so-called Johannesburg Declaration) . Furthermore, efforts to harmonize trade and trade activities and the environment, which are in direct contact with the development, have been continuously carried out, and the content has been specified in the WTO (World Trade Organization) Agreement. As a result, the WTO system has provided the basis for discussing environmental protection and sustainable development, and the link between trade and the environment has been formulated at the WTO level.
In this process, the tendency to link environmental problems to commercial policies such as WTO multilateral negotiations and free trade agreements (FTAs) has emerged in earnest. Especially, since the beginning of the 1990s, the free trade agreement, which has started to increase sharply since then and has been spreading until recently, has placed environmental chapter directly or indirectly dealing with environmental problems. Discussions on the environment continue in FTA negotiations, and their importance is increasing. NAFTA is a representative example of an FTA, including environmental regulations, and many advanced countries such as Europe and the US were active in including environmental regulations in FTAs. Since the Korea - US FTA, Korea - China FTA, Korea - Peru FTA, Korea - Australia FTA, Korea - Canada FTA, Korea - New Zealand FTA, Korea - Turkey FTA, Korea- Colombia FTA, etc. all recently concluded FTAs contain separate environmental regulations or trade and sustainable development. TPP, a multilateral FTA, also deals with environmental issues by setting separate environmental regulations in chapter 20 of the 30 chapters.
On the other hand, FTA negotiations, which were concluded mainly between the two countries or among a few countries, were the mainstream. Recently, however, multilateral FTA negotiations, in which several nations participate at the same time, are newly emerging. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement reached on October 5, 2015 is a representative example. These multilateral FTA movements will not only maintain a liberal global economic order created by western countries after the Second World War by aiming at broader market access than the FTAs that have been undertaken by a few countries in advanced Western countries, but also intend to utilize the ''Mega-FTA'' as a turning point in the rebound and re-leap away from the relatively low position in the status of trade order until recently.
In this study, The purpose of this study is to analyze Korea - US FTA, which has the first separate Environmental Chapter of the FTAs signed by Korea, and the Korea - China FTA environmental regulations, in order to prepare for negotiations with China, which will always face the environmental negotiations such as RCEP. and to identify characteristics between these FTA environmental regulations and TPP environmental regulations, and to set the direction of content to be included in other Mega-FTA environmental regulations such as RCEP.
For this we first examined how GATT and WTO regulations regulate the relationship between trade and the environment, and examined in detail how GATT regulations address environmental disputes in particular. Particularly, as the trade regulation through the TBT agreement and the discriminative trade regulation according to the process and production methods (PPMs) are treated as important issues in contemporary environmental trade disputes, the analysis was also carried out. Next, we reviewed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has directly or indirectly influenced the FTA for the past 20 years in the era of FTAs since the 1990s, and Based on the FTA that we concluded, we examined how the environment is reflected and regulated in the FTA.
In addition, the content of the TPP environmental regulation, which is the core of this study, was closely analyzed and examined. As the overall content and level of the overall agreement and environmental regulations are evaluated to be similar to those of the ROK-US FTA, the contents of the TPP''s environmental regulations are analyzed in detail in comparison with the environmental regulations of the ROK-US FTA, We did a more detailed analysis of the specific environmental issues not covered by environmental regulations. Based on the analyzed results, we examined the implications of TPP environmental regulations, focusing on positive evaluation and negative evaluation.
The TPP, which received worldwide attention with the first Mega-FTA to become a member of 12 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, has fallen into a light before the wind. In the recent US presidential election, the Republican Party''s Donald Trump was elected, and the TPP''s passage to parliament became uncertain. Donald Trump has insisted on withdrawing from the TPP, saying TPP did not benefit the US national interest since his candidacy. On the other hand, China is in favor of the disposal of TPP. China has said it will spur RCEP negotiations on the dismissal of Donald Trump''s TPP, and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, President of the Republic of Peru, proposed "to build a new Pacific Rim economic cooperation agreement with the exception of the United States," adding that China and Russia would be added.
So far, this study analyzed TPP environmental regulations on the basis of TPP ratification, and explained the implications and countermeasures for negotiations. Even if the TPP treaty itself is not ratified and there is a concern that it will be abandoned by a leader of a particular country, its meaning will not be faded or meaningless. The process leading to the conclusion of the TPP and the conclusions drawn from the process are meaningful in themselves and it is clear that the first Mega-FTA will be used as a core model in the negotiation process of Mega-FTA such as RCEP, FTAAP and TTIP to be made in the future. Korea has signed an FTA with most TPP member countries, although it has not yet joined TPP, and is currently a key participant in RCEP. Therefore, it is a meaningful task to analyze the TPP Agreement and to prepare for future FTA and Mega-FTA negotiations based on this analysis.