By: Piyush Verma
“Clean trade” has entered official vocabulary without acquiring a common definition. The European Union signed its first Clean Trade and Investment Partnership (CTIP) with South Africa in November 2025 and held the first government-to-government dialogue under it in July 2026. At the World Trade Organization, the Trade and Environmental Sustainability Structured Discussions took a package of outcomes on environmental goods, trade-related climate measures, subsidies, and the circular economy to the March ministerial conference. The policy architecture is developing faster than a common vocabulary for describing it.
Part of the reason is that clean trade is much broader than trade in clean-energy technologies. A useful way to make sense of it is through five categories that are increasingly connected but governed by different logics.
Hardware, clean-energy technologies and equipment. Solar modules, wind turbines, batteries, electric vehicles, electrolyzers, heat pumps, and grid equipment are the most visible part of the clean economy, and they behave like other manufactured goods, shaped by tariffs, subsidies, production costs, domestic-content rules, and industrial policy. Most of today’s argument over clean-energy trade, from solar panels to battery plants, sits here.
Minerals and materials: the intermediate inputs that clean-energy technologies require. Lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, graphite, rare earths, polysilicon, and processed battery materials have become central to the energy transition without being clean in themselves. Copper remains copper whether it carries electrons in a transmission line or sits inside a conventional industrial process. What brings these commodities into the discussion is their position in low-carbon supply chains, which is why the geography of refining can matter as much as the location of the ore.
Energy carriers: electricity, hydrogen, ammonia, biofuels, sustainable aviation fuel, and synthetic fuels. These are not traded in the same way. Electricity depends on physical interconnection and remains largely regional, while fuels and molecules can move over longer distances. Low-emissions hydrogen and ammonia depend on production, transport, and certification systems that are still developing. Liquid fuels are easier to trade internationally, but their climate value depends heavily on how they were produced.
Industrial goods: conventional products made with lower emissions. Steel, aluminum, cement, fertilizers, and chemicals are rarely called clean-energy goods, yet they now sit near the center of the debates around energy transitions. A ton of low-emissions steel is still steel. What distinguishes it is the carbon intensity of the process behind it. Clean trade here is less about what countries trade than about how the goods they already trade are produced.
Attributes and verification: the claims attached to products and the systems that test them. Guarantees of origin, renewable energy certificates, emissions accounting, and product-level carbon data increasingly decide whether a product can credibly be called lower-carbon. Sometimes nothing physical moves at all. What crosses the border is a claim about production, and the question is whether it will be believed.
Put together, the five categories reveal why clean trade is difficult to govern. The first three are primarily about physical supply: who produces the equipment, who controls or processes the inputs, and whether the infrastructure exists to move energy. Industrial goods and attributes introduce another question: recognition. A ton of low-emissions steel or a cargo of renewable hydrogen acquires its “clean” value only if the buyer accepts how its emissions were measured. Clean trade therefore depends on both supply chains and rulebooks.
Those two sides can pull in different directions. Governments are trying to build domestic capacity and reduce dependence on concentrated suppliers, while emerging carbon standards and market-access rules increasingly differentiate products according to how they were produced. A new producer may therefore need not only finance and technology, but also the measurement systems required to demonstrate that its product qualifies. This helps explain why the European Union-South Africa partnership stretches across grids, clean fuels, raw materials, procurement, regulatory cooperation, and local value addition.
Listing verification fifth understates it. Measurement increasingly determines whether products in the other four can credibly qualify as “clean.” If two economies calculate the emissions embedded in steel differently, or define renewable hydrogen by different rules, a technical disagreement becomes a question of market access. Accounting conventions can therefore become terms of entry.
That carries a consequence the vocabulary obscures. The burden of proof falls on exporters, and most heavily on firms in economies where metering, registries, auditing, and certification capacities are thin. Treating that capacity as infrastructure to be financed, rather than paperwork to be demanded, will shape who can participate in clean trade. It is also among the most practical things a partnership can deliver.
Clean trade, then, is an umbrella concept. The definition will keep moving, but the direction is visible. As decarbonization extends beyond electricity into transport, manufacturing, steel, and chemicals, the share of world trade untouched by clean energy accounting is likely to shrink. So the useful question is not where clean trade begins and ends. Trade policy has traditionally governed what crosses a border. Clean trade increasingly governs what happened before it gets there. That shift may prove more consequential than any terminology. The open question is whether the systems needed to verify production can be built quickly and cheaply enough for more than a handful of economies to use them.
Piyush Verma is a Senior Fellow for the Energy & Climate program at ORF America.