The post-Lisbon role of the European Parliament in the EU's Common Commercial Policy: Implications for bilateral trade negotiations. EU Diplomacy Paper 05/2012, July 2012

This paper sets out to conduct an empirical analysis of the post-Lisbon role of the European Parliament (EP) in the EU’s Common Commercial Policy through an examination of the ‘deep and comprehensive’ bilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) currently negotiated as part of the EU’s Global Europe strategy. The EU-Korea and EU-India FTAs are used as case studies in order to determine the implications of the EP’s enhanced trade powers on the processes, actors and outcomes of EU bilateral trade policy. The EP is now endowed with the ‘hard power’ of consent in the ratification phase of FTAs, acting as a threat to strengthen its ‘soft power’ to influence negotiations. The EP is developing strategies to influence the mandate and now plays an important role in the implementation of FTAs. The entry of this new player on the Brussels trade policy field has brought about a shift in the institutional balance of power and opened up the EP as a new point of access for trade policy lobbyists. Finally, increased EP involvement in EU trade policy has brought about a politicisation of EU trade policy and greater normative outcomes of FTAs.

Feeding–Danger Trade-Offs Underlie Stopover Site Selection by Migrants

To migrate successfully, birds need to store adequate fat reserves to fuel each leg of the journey. Migrants acquire their fuel reserves at stopover sites; this often entails exposure to predators. Therefore, the safety attributes of sites may be as important as the feeding opportunities. Furthermore, site choice might depend on fuel load, with lean birds more willing to accept danger to obtain good feeding. Here, we evaluate the factors underlying stopover-site usage by migrant Western Sandpipers (Calidris mauri) on a landscape scale. We measured the food and danger attributes of 17 potential stopover sites in the Strait of Georgia and Puget Sound region. We used logistic regression models to test whether food, safety, or both were best able to predict usage of these sites by Western Sandpipers. Eight of the 17 sites were used by sandpipers on migration. Generally, sites that were high in food and safety were used, whereas sites that were low in food and safety were not. However, dangerous sites were used if there was ample food abundance, and sites with low food abundance were used if they were safe. The model including both food and safety best-predicted site usage by sandpipers. Furthermore, lean sandpipers used the most dangerous sites, whereas heavier birds (which do not need to risk feeding in dangerous locations) used safer sites. This study demonstrates that both food and danger attributes are considered by migrant birds when selecting stopover sites, thus both these attributes should be considered to prioritize and manage stopover sites for conservation.

A Possible Influence of Equatorial Winds on the September 2002 Southern Hemisphere Sudden Warming Event

The stratospheric sudden warming in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) in September 2002 was unexpected for two reasons. First, planetary wave activity in the Southern Hemisphere is very weak, and midwinter warmings have never been observed, at least not since observations of the upper stratosphere became regularly available. Second, the warming occurred in a west phase of the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) in the lower stratosphere. This is unexpected because warmings are usually considered to be more likely in the east phase of the QBO, when a zero wind line is present in the winter subtropics and hence confines planetary wave propagation to higher latitudes closer to the polar vortex. At first, this evidence suggests that the sudden warming must therefore be simply a result of anomalously strong planetary wave forcing from the troposphere. However, recent model studies have suggested that the midwinter polar vortex may also be sensitive to the equatorial winds in the upper stratosphere, the region dominated by the semiannual oscillation. In this paper, the time series of equatorial zonal winds from two different data sources, the 40-yr ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA) and the Met Office assimilated dataset, are reviewed. Both suggest that the equatorial winds in the upper stratosphere above 10 hPa were anomalously easterly in 2002. Idealized model experiments are described in which the modeled equatorial winds were relaxed toward these observations for various years to examine whether the anomalous easterlies in 2002 could influence the timing of a warming event. It is found that the 2002 equatorial winds speed up the evolution of a warming event in the model. Therefore, this study suggests that the anomalous easterlies in the 1–10-hPa region may have been a contributory factor in the development of the observed SH warming. However, it is concluded that it is unlikely that the anomalous equatorial winds alone can explain the 2002 warming event.