Green Risk Regulation Mechanisms of Digital Trade under the Global Climate Governance Framework

Abstract

This article investigates how the twin transitions of digitalisation and decarbonisation jointly reshape the logic of global trade by creating new configurations of ``green risk'' in digital trade. It argues that digital trade is environmentally ambivalent: if guided only by efficiency and speed, energy-intensive data infrastructures, fragmented cross-border logistics and proliferating e-waste can lock in high-carbon development paths. Drawing on Environmental Kuznets Curve reasoning, new institutional economics and the technology--organisation--environment framework, the study develops a system-oriented ``Digital Trade--Environment--Regulation'' (DTER) model that captures feedback loops between trade expansion, carbon emissions and regulatory responses. On this basis, it constructs a three-pillar regulatory architecture centred on cost internalisation, information transparency and algorithmic steering, and embeds it in a system dynamics simulation framework. Scenario analysis of EU-type, China-type and US-type regimes illustrates how different combinations of carbon pricing, infrastructure policy and platform governance shift the timing and height of the emissions peak while reconfiguring trade costs and market access conditions. The article concludes that well-designed green regulation can turn environmental compliance from a latent trade barrier into a driver of long-term competitiveness, provided that standards are interoperable, data governance is trusted and facilitation benefits are explicitly linked to credible low-carbon performance.