The Next Frontier of Climate Policy: Joining the Dots of Bricks, Trade and Embodied Emissions from Cambodia and Bangladesh to the UK

Through an intensive focus on debt bonded brick workers in one of the world's most climate vulnerable countries (Kreft et al., 2014), the 2017 ESRC-DIFD project Blood Bricks provided compelling evidence of the linkages between global carbon emissions and the built environment. A little over two years later, as 'the climate emergency deepens' (Guardian, 2019), these two linked trends are increasingly shaping environmental risk in the contemporary world. Global carbon emissions are failing to decline fast enough, reaching an all-time high last year (Le Quéré et al., 2018) whilst 'rapid urbanisation increases climate risk for billions' (UNFCCC, 2017: 1). Today, the built environment is responsible for 39% of carbon emissions worldwide (World Green Building Council, 2019), whilst "embodied carbon" - carbon emissions released whilst producing, transporting and erecting building materials - is set to account for half of the carbon footprint of construction by 2050.

Linking climate change and the built environment in this way casts the climate policy of numerous countries, not least the UK, in an unfavourable light. The UK is the world's 5th highest embodied CO2 importer (Moran et al., 2018) and despite carbon emissions from goods and services produced in the UK falling by 35% since 1997, greenhouse gasses related to imports have risen 28% over the same period. The anticipated shift in trade towards non-European partners after Brexit is expected to exacerbate this discrepancy, ultimately engendering a rise in imported emissions of between 5 and 11% (Fezzinga et al., 2019).

Building on the achievements of the ESRC-DFID funded project Blood Bricks, in Cambodia and Safe and Sustainable Cities, in Bangladesh, this program aims to extend the in-country benefit of those projects upwards and outwards in order to examine the intersections between poverty, environmental sustainability and fragility of livelihoods. Bringing together experts in supply chain analysis, embodied emissions, and construction to work with government and industry on the environmental and human impacts of international trade, the impact activities will frame the issue of embodied emissions not only in terms of carbon emissions, but also poverty and inequality, highlighting how international trade and investment serve, as shown in our prior grants, to exacerbate poverty in the global South due to the 'close links between climate change and social inequality' (Islam and Winkel, 2017).

It will demonstrate this through two examples. First, it will commission an expanded supply chain analysis to highlight the social and environmental footprint of the UK's £1.4 billion of trade with Cambodia. Second, it will calculate the emissions embodied in bricks imported from Bangladesh, where brick production is associated with 'toxic fumes and atrocious working conditions' (Climate and Clean Air Commission, 2019), alongside growing concerns over the impact of air pollution and massive topsoil harvesting for the brick industry on local people's ability to sustain traditional livelihoods (Dhaka Tribune, 2019).

In a series of workshops and events aimed at policymakers, construction industry stakeholders and the public, the proposed program will highlight the growing importance of this phenomenon and its concerning implications for Sustainable Development Goals 8, in relation to labour rights and decent work, 11, on sustainable cities and communities, and 13 on climate action. In doing so, it will demonstrate how climate change and trade intersect as a threat multiplier amongst those experiencing vulnerability and poverty. Specifically, it will bring to wider attention that brick production in each of these countries is characterised by high levels of emissions, local environmental degradation and abuses of labour rights (Brown et al., 2018; Bales, 2016), aiming ultimately towards completely new policy thinking on the interface of climate change, poverty and trade.

Building on the impact successes of Blood Bricks, which saw the project developed as an Impact Initiative brief and a 2021 Research Excellence Framework case study by Royal Holloway, the proposed impact program is fundamentally attuned to the pursuit of meaningful policy change. Its central premise is therefore the growing school of thought that emissions hidden in trade are to blame for the ongoing failures of national and international regulation to instigate meaningful reductions both in global emissions (Moran et al., 2018) and the social impacts of climate change.

To prevent further burden-shifting, 'major economies must recognize that even strong regulation on domestic emissions in major economies may not be effective in reducing total global emissions due to their imported carbon footprint' (Moran et al., 2018: 8). Nevertheless, because policymakers often lack a clear motivation to transition to a footprint approach (Peters et al., 2011), the uptake of consumption based and embodied emissions accounting has been limited. The overarching aim of this program is to begin to construct such an incentive, via the three overarching routes outlined below

1) Policymakers: Aiming to 'join the dots' of UK Climate Policy, this program will bring together stakeholders from at least three government and autonomous agencies: DFID, Defra and the CCC as part of a workshop to discuss the integration of policy goals related to climate change. This will result in a co-authored briefing paper on inter-agency communication on issues of trade, environmental standards, social impacts and emissions. Working with Solidarity Centre offices in Cambodia and Bangladesh, this report will subsequently be translated for discussion amongst national policymakers in order to work towards durable environmental and labour standards for international investment in the construction industry.

2) Corporate stakeholders: Building on the WTO's recent conference on Natural Disasters and Trade, this program will work towards enhancing recognition of the bi-directional nature of this relationship, bringing together evidence and provoking discussion on how international trade contributes not only to growing carbon emissions, but also worsening the impacts of climate change in terms of poverty and maladaptation. Building on a combined 60 years of networks and expertise in the construction industry within the program advisory board, efforts in this respect will be centred on a corporate stakeholder workshop to explore linkages between climate change and UK trade. Using novel digital supply chain mapping methodologies developed by Janet Godsell, this workshop will make a compelling case for the commercial, as well as ethical, value of transparency in supply chains and trade.

3) Public Awareness of Trade-Climate Change Linkages: The final impact package aims to enhance public awareness of the linkages between climate change, climate impacts and trade. This will be pursued in two ways. First, a website will be constructed, combining Ian Cook's award winning Follow the Things website on supply chain impacts and Janet Godsell's expertise in digital supply chain analysis. This platform will host photographs and data on how carbon emissions and climate impacts are linked to global commodity supply chains, providing an accessible and updateable resource to host data on commodity supply chains and climate change. Finally, a public exhibition entitled will be hosted at The Building Centre in London, where photographs of the international brick supply chain will be presented to media and the public alongside data collected by stakeholders involved in impact package 2. Building on the success of the Blood Bricks exhibition, which brought in 21,000 visitors, this exhibition will also provide the opportunity to launch the public facing report to media, industry and policy figures.