Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We are the charity and think tank that is all about ambitious leadership for the environment. I'm Sarah Williams, head of the Greener UK unit at Green Alliance. Now Green UK is a coalition of 13 major environmental organisations.

We came together to ensure that environmental protections are maintained and enhanced during the Brexit process,

particularly through the introduction of ambitious domestic legislation.

Now that we have left the EU, we're urging the UK and devolved governments to build on our high environmental standards and protections,

including when negotiating the future relationship and trade agreements, which brings me nicely to

the subject of today's podcast, which is trade. And I'm delighted to have with me today, Tom West,

UK Environment Lead at Kline Earth, a charity that uses the power of the law to protect the

environment and fight climate change. Tom, welcome. Would you like to say a few words about

what you do there? Sure. So I lead on our work relating to Brexit and trade. Well, actually now

we're looking not just on Brexit, but on sort of wider governance issues too, but certainly on trade.

And I also chair the Greener UK Trade Group.

Very nice to have you on the podcast.

Brexit means that the UK now gets the opportunity to vise its own approach to international

trade for the first time in over 40 years.

So it's gone from a subject that was fairly niche to one receiving much more attention.

We've seen the government announce a start of two big negotiations recently with the US and Japan in

the last month alone. So I mean, as environmentalists, why should we care about trade?

If you think about where anything that we have comes from, we live in a global world.

So if you care about where your beef comes from or where your cocoa comes from,

then you need to care about trade.

So that's on the import side, but the export side is relevant too.

So where's this stuff coming from? How has it been produced? How's it getting here?

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