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

Lead Research Organisation: Royal Holloway University of London
Department Name: Geography

Abstract

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.

Planned Impact

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.
 
Title Disaster Trade Outdoor Exhibition 
Description As the UK prepares for COP 26, British politicians are lauding the UK's success in reducing its carbon footprint. But all is not as it seems. As the new Disaster Trade exhibition reveals, the true global impact of the British economy is hidden from observers, but no less destructive for it. Focusing on imports from Cambodia, Sri Lanka and the South Asian "brick belt", this exhibition exemplifies how British trade shapes the disasters that afflict the UK's trading partners. Drawing on global quantitative data, personal testimonies and professional photography, it exposes how the UK's trade in garments, bricks and tea serves to displace emissions and environmental degradation, whilst intensifying the impacts of natural hazards linked to climate change. The exhibition, which includes both indoor and outdoor elements, will run for a month from 13th October to November 13th 2021 at the St Martin in the Fields rear courtyard and indoor foyer, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 4JJ. 
Type Of Art Artistic/Creative Exhibition 
Year Produced 2021 
Impact This exhibition provided tens of thousands of members of the public with the opportunity to observe and engage with the findings of the project. The launch had over 50 attendees, before the subsequent 30 day residence allowed hundreds of people to connect with the project every day. 
URL https://www.disastertrade.org/events/ylbt4ifbpxhd18smjqe0afaox7ik1k
 
Title Professional photography of brick kilns 
Description The Disaster Trade project has employed a number of creative professionals to collaborate in visually communicating the sites and themes explored here. Due to the project extension awarded, most of these creative developments are still currently underway. However, the a gallery of brick kiln images from Bangladesh has already been compiled, whilst galleries of landslide risk in Sri Lanka and export brick kilns in Gujarat are currently being composed. Videography of the global garment supply chain, including its human and environmental impacts in Cambodia, are underway. In addition to the professional graphic design of the website, exhibition and infographic design will reflect the goal of appealing aesthetically to a lay and public audience. 
Type Of Art Image 
Year Produced 2021 
Impact Most outputs have not yet been released. Thought the project has not yet officially launched for public dissemination, the website has attracted 1600 views to date. Key public facing elements of the project artwork and infographic can be seen at the project website address below. 
URL https://www.disastertrade.org/
 
Description 1. The Environmental Footprint of UK Trade

Neither climate change, nor its impacts are domestic issues, yet we continue to view both through a national lens. The vast network of processes and interconnections that make up the global economy not only underpin and distribute the production of carbon, but shape its impacts also, distributing processes of production - and the environmental impacts that go with them - to places far from where those goods are ultimately used. The goal of this brief is to exemplify the complexity of the processes that shape environmental change - and in doing so, to highlight the shortcomings of the national accounting mechanisms used to measure it - but also to raise the question of responsibility. How environmental degradation is measured and how its costs are attributed and managed are two elements within the same equation. In pursuit of a new approach, each of the below recommendations highlights distinct dimensions of this issue with reference to specific case studies.

Case study 1: Brick imports from South Asia to the UK

The first case examined here concerns the rapidly growing phenomenon of brick importation from outside the UK. Once self-sufficient in terms of brick production, the UK has since the recession of 2008 seen production fall behind demand. As a result, the UK has now risen to become the world's largest importer of bricks, importing more than 400,000 in 2019 (HMRC, 2020). Moreover, these bricks are coming from further and further afield. Bricks imported from outside the EU increased more than tenfold in the five years between 2015 and 2019, from 3,088,902 to 32,942,280: a low value, high weight trade that generates carbon on an enormous scale. Produced in largely unregulated kilns and shipped thousands of miles by boat, a three-kilogram house brick imported from outside the EU has a carbon cost three times higher than one produced domestically. Worse still, they carry with them a legacy of local environmental destruction and human exploitation on a scale that the UK has long since eliminated domestically, yet on which the goods we consume continue to depend.

Case study 2: Garment Imports from Cambodia to the UK

In the second case, that of Cambodia, the aim is to highlight the role of the country within a wider process of trade and environmental destruction. A garment labelled "Made in Cambodia" tells only a small part of a far larger, global story. Cambodia has no cotton fields and neither produces, nor processes the raw materials which comprise its clothes. Rather, these materials have come in many cases from as far away as the United States, Ivory Coast or Brazil. The vast majority, 84%, of cotton exports from Cambodia to the UK come directly or indirectly from China: a country whose status as 'the world's factory' (Mees, 2016) has come at a heavy environmental cost (Albert and Xu, 2016). With China now committed to net zero in the next four decades, many high emission and environmentally damaging production processes are being moved to countries with a net carbon budget remaining, such as Cambodia. To meet the energy demand for this expanded production, Cambodia is investing heavily in coal power, increasing grid intensity from a planned 5.2 tons C02/ ton garments under its previous energy plan, to 8.3 tons of C02/ ton garments under the new plan. This will result in an increase in the UK's imported emissions of the equivalent of burning 70,000 tons of coal each year.

Case Study 3: Tea Imports from Sri Lanka to the UK

The third part of this study explores the production of Ceylon tea in Sri Lanka's central highlands. Long a central pillar of the Sri Lankan economy, the tea trade has suffered in recent years, as the impacts of climate change increase costs and reduce yields. Tea plantations have begun to decline and become more risky to work in due to intense, climate change-linked rainfall. From 1990 to 2001, an average of 587 Sri Lankans were affected by landslides each year. From 2002 to 2019, this annual figure rose to 15,400: a 26-fold increase. Tea plantations play a key role in increasing this risk, being linked to over 60% of landslides according to studies elsewhere. In Sri Lanka, British tea plantations are located in areas of extremely high landslide risk, with 44% located in areas of high landslide risk and 3.4% located in areas facing the highest level of landslide risk.

2. The Problem: Environmental impacts in a Dynamic, Complex and International Economy

Although each of these cases focuses upon a distinct commodity and geographical area, they demonstrate in combination how the environmental regulations that appear in a domestic sense to resolve issues of environmental degradation frequently induce the mobility of environmental impacts across borders and beyond the reach of predominantly nationally focused regulations. Carbon emissions are then hidden by the complexity of the supply chains within which they are emitted. With international transport emissions, in particular, tending to fall outside of the purview of regulation, the result is a substantial source of carbon emissions hidden amidst the movement of international trade.
Moreover, an additional element is the intensification of climate-linked hazards in British supply chains. As rising atmospheric carbon concentrations increase the risk of extreme weather and natural hazards, processes of international trade shape, direct and intensify its impacts. Indeed, as is increasingly recognised, the impacts of disasters is articulated by the socioeconomic circumstances within which they manifest (Natarajan and Parsons, 2021; Kelman, 2020; Mora, 2009). Carbon emissions may therefore increase the likelihood of a given hazard - floods, or heavy rain, for example - but whether that hazard becomes a disaster in which lives are lost or displaced, and homes and livelihoods destroyed, depends upon the conditions it finds. Thus, it is these elements in combination that constitutes the full disaster footprint of international trade. For example:

• In the "brick belt" of Bangladesh and India, excavated paddy fields in the vicinity of sand dredged rivers, shaped by bricks produced for UK consumers, become focal points of vulnerability to flooding, whilst pollution and environmental degradation render adaptation more challenging for those affected.
• In the Cambodian garment industry, goods made for British consumers are linked to large scale deforestation in order to provide fuel for ironing processes, leading to local environmental degradation, and intensifying rainfall change and flooding
• In the Sri Lankan highlands, similarly, heavy rains linked to climate change present a far greater risk to those lands reformed for tea production than others around them, thereby directing and channelling the risk of landslides towards those tasked with producing the beverage for British consumers.
Tackling these intensified risks in British supply chains requires, overarchingly, a shift in emphasis across multiple sectors of governance and corporate practice, yet before this may be achieved it requires a renovation of the manner in which environmental impacts and policies are conceptualised, in order to connect the dislocated policy spheres of adaptation, mitigation and corporate governance.

Recommendation 1: Accounting for Emissions

The ongoing dominance of domestic carbon emissions accounting presents a key issue for climate governance. Nevertheless, although advocated against on a number of fronts in recent years (WWF, 2020a; Moran et al., 2018; House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, 2012), it remains a difficult point to address both because national responsibility for environmental impacts is enshrined in all major environmental treaties, from Paris to Kyoto (Nielsen et al., 2020), but also because it tends to portray major global economies in a positive light, lending it support amongst influential political actors. The UK's success in reducing domestic carbon emissions by 44% since 1990 is a key case in point. Viewed in terms of what is consumed - rather than produced - within UK borders, carbon emissions have declined by at most 15% (WWF, 2020a). Yet without a clear motivation to transition to a footprint approach (Peters et al., 2011), the uptake of consumption-based and embodied emissions accounting remains limited.
Despite this problem of incentive, it is a key priority that carbon accounting transitions to supply chain-led model of emissions regulation. This is because as things stand, legal environmental standards effectively apply only to domestically produced products, whilst imported and supply chain emissions are subject to voluntary corporate standards (HM Government Environmental Reporting Guidelines, 2019). Rather than encouraging a reduction in emissions, the domestic framing instead encourages 'outsourcing' (Baumert et al., 2019; Malik and Lan, 2016) emissions overseas. In order to halt this process of 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).

Recommendation 2: Coordination of Policy

The recent announcement of the UK's sixth carbon budget in April 2021, saw the UK commit to reducing net carbon emissions by 78% compared to 1990 levels. Nevertheless, if these emissions are to be meaningfully eliminated, rather than simply moved, coordination of government policy is key. Central to ameliorating this broader issue is understanding how responsibility for complex, international supply chains and their impacts is disaggregated between government departments. As exemplified in the UK government Environmental Reporting guidelines (2019), domestic environmental management, waste and sustainability are managed by The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [DEFRA], whilst carbon accounting and supply chain emissions fall under the remit of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy [BEIS]. Adaptation to climate change impacts domestically is overseen by DEFRA in partnership with the Environment Agency, amongst others, whilst adaptation overseas is the remit of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office [FCDO].

This range of actors involved in the management of UK climate change reflects the breadth and scale of the issue. Yet the distinct approaches to governance practiced by each agency introduces issues of competing and sometimes counterproductive incentives. Whereas domestic environmental regulations are stringently monitored, and domestic carbon accounting mandated, supply chain environmental impacts and emissions are subject only to voluntary reporting. In some respects, this reflects the contrasting remits of DEFRA - responsible squarely for domestic environmental management - and BEIS - whose dual responsibility for both 'business' and 'industrial strategy' that incentivises a lighter tough on regulation. Nevertheless, the ultimate result is to incentivise offshoring of emissions and industrial environmental impacts, a process demonstrated throughout this report.

In contributing to the intensity of climate change impacts overseas, therefore, strict domestic industrial regulations set out by DEFRA, combined with somewhat looser international guidelines set out by BEIS, effectively undermine the sustainable development and adaptation goals overseen by the FCDO. This is not only environmentally damaging, but fiscally inefficient. Yet in a positive sense, the coordination of government objectives and budgets has the potential not only to deliver meaningful improvements in the sustainability of UK business, but to do so without additional investment of government funding.
UK government agencies related to industry, development and climate finance must be encouraged to work collaboratively, rather than discretely, in order that their goals complement each other rather than working against one another. First, further co-ordination of regulation between DEFRA and BEIS - including more stringent supply chain monitoring intended to match the regulation set out by DEFRA - will attend to reducing the incentive to offshore emissions. Second, co-ordination of BEIS supply chain regulation with FCDO development and adaptation goals is needed, in order to ensure that British business overseas does not contribute to undermining FCDO funded adaptation and sustainable development programs in the global South.

Recommendation 3: Definition of Supply Chains

In the context of our increasingly interconnected global economy, a key issue facing both carbon emission mitigation and climate change adaptation efforts is the difficulty of delineating the true extent of the supply chains contributing to the production of UK goods. Companies are currently given the freedom to define their own supply chain, both for their (voluntary) emission reporting obligations and for the purposes of any commercial claims made concerning waste, recycling and environmental impacts. This self-definition of supply chains presents significant problems in terms of emissions reporting. Neither buyers themselves, nor intermediary firms along the supply chain, are incentivised by this system to discern the complex processes that supply them, resulting in oversimplified supply chains in which only primary actors are represented.
This system presents three problems. First, it incentives the subcontracting of more environmentally destructive processes to subsidiary operations, beyond the regulation of buyers oversight: a process that renders supply chains artificially simple to regulate. Second, it allows supply chains to be conceptually shortened, often hiding the true distances travelled by raw materials in the course of producing UK goods. Third, it elides the complexity of production processes, presenting supply chains as fundamentally linear, where in reality they depend on networks of industrial producers working in collaboration, each element of which carries its own environmental impact.
Given the announcement, in the recent sixth carbon budget, that emissions from shipping will form part of the UK's net zero commitments, this failure to account for the true extent of supply chains and the systems of shipping that support them, presents a significant issue. In the case of the garment industry, current assessments of the length of shipping supply chains - and thus the carbon emissions with which they are associated - are significant underestimates and it is likely that similar issues prevail elsewhere. Greater regulation and oversight of the provenance of raw materials within complex supply chains is therefore an essential precondition not only for meaningful compliance with the UK's upcoming carbon commitments, but also the ability to monitor the environmental impacts of UK trade as a whole. To be genuinely meaningful, moreover, such monitoring must extend beyond a reliance on voluntary self-reporting of corporate supply chains.

Recommendation 4: Intensified Climate Impacts in the Global Economy

As highlighted in the case of Cambodia, Sri Lanka and the South Asian brick belt, the contexts within which climate impacts emerge are structured in predictable ways by economic processes, shaping the manifestation of climate change in certain areas, and thus directing and intensifying its impacts. Whether this takes the form of local resource depletion, such as water or forest wood; or local environmental degradation in the form of water or airborne pollutants, the impact on health and livelihoods compromises the adaptive capacity of those affected, intensifying the impacts of the changing climate where they are felt. These local environmental impacts worsen the impacts of climate change in the vicinity of production processes, shaping a geography of climatic precarity in which large scale climatic and local economic factors combine to generate an intensified geography of climate change impacts.

Those subject to this kind of complex climate risk face high levels of exposure to climatic hazards, low levels of capital to adapt and high levels of risk intensification engendered by local environmental degradation linked to supply chains extending beyond the local area. That these supply chains are often linked to global Northern consumers presents both responsibility and opportunity: the necessity to act, but also the ability to do so. Understanding climate impacts in this context therefore requires a monitoring framework capable of extending beyond geographical boundaries, in order to better reflect the mobile processes of trade shaping environmental change in the global South.

References

Albert, E. and Xu, B. (2016). China's Environmental Crisis. Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder. Accessed on 06/07/2021 at [https://cfr. org]
Baumert, N., Kander, A., Jiborn, M., Kulionis, V., & Nielsen, T. (2019). Global outsourcing of carbon emissions 1995-2009: A reassessment. Environmental Science & Policy, 92, 228-236
Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs [HMRC]. (2020). UK Brick Import Data. Private Communication via the Brick Development Association
HM Government (2019). Environmental Reporting Guidelines: Including streamlined energy and carbon reporting guidance. London: HM Government
House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee (2012). Consumption-Based Emissions Reporting. Twelfth Report of Session 2010-12, Volume I. London: House of Commons.
Kelman, I. (2020). Disaster by choice: How our actions turn natural hazards into catastrophes. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Malik, A., & Lan, J. (2016). The role of outsourcing in driving global carbon emissions. Economic Systems Research, 28(2), 168-182.
Mees, H. (2016). China as the World's Factory. In Mees, H. The Chinese birdcage. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 21-32.
Mora, S. (2009). Disasters are not natural: risk management, a tool for development. Geological Society, London, Engineering Geology Special Publications, 22(1), 101-112.
Moran, D., Hasanbeigi, A., & Springer, C. (2018). The Carbon Loophole in Climate Policy. Quantifying the Embodied Carbon in Traded Products. San Francisco: KGM & Associates, Global Efficiency Intelligence, Climate Work Foundations
Natarajan, N. and Parsons, L. (2021). Climate Change in the Global Workplace: Labour, Adaptation, Resistance. London: Routledge.
Nielsen, T., Baumert, N., Kander, A., Jiborn, M., & Kulionis, V. (2021). The risk of carbon leakage in global climate agreements. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 21(2), 147-163.
Peters, G. P., Minx, J. C., Weber, C. L., & Edenhofer, O. (2011). Growth in emission transfers via international trade from 1990 to 2008. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 108(21), 8903-8908.
World Wildlife Fund (2020a). Carbon Footprint: Exploring the UK's contribution to Climate Change. London: WWF.
Exploitation Route Once complete, the key aim of this project is to highlight the need for integrated systems of environmental monitoring, which are equipped to deal with the globalized realities of production and trade. More broadly, the aim will be to highlight a new area of research at the intersection of economic activity and environmental risk, bringing to both public and academic consciousness the extent to which the economic decisions we make shape the geography of climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts.

As this project shows, climate change impacts, including the slow burn disasters of droughts and floods, are therefore effectively traded out by wealthier countries and exported by less wealthy ones as the price of economic growth. All the while, this environmental degradation remains hidden by the analytical legacy of nationalism: an emphasis on the structures and strictures of the nation state no longer appropriate for a globalised and interconnected world. In view of this, what is necessary is a new conception. One which recognises disasters not as autonomously emergent or globally induced, but as rooted in specific process of industry, trade and consumption.

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, this report aims to reframe both the global and local impacts of climate change as articulated through the economic structures that sustain our globalised economy. Emphasising the 'close links between climate change and social inequality' (Islam and Winkel, 2017), it highlights the role of global trade both in shaping, mobilising and concealing the impacts of the changing climate, creating the space, in doing so, for a system of regulation better suited to a mobile and globalised world.
Sectors Agriculture, Food and Drink,Environment
 
Description Please note that due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the extension of the project no findings have been presented and no impact activities yet undertaken. These are all scheduled for May and June. The ongoing impact strategy focuses on emphasising the paucity of legal coverage relating to trade and thus the manner in which bulk imports of this sort fall through the cracks of environmental governance. This is an issue of cross-cutting relevance to multiple government and non-government agencies, yet the international, displaced nature of the environmental impact dislocates it beyond the reach of regulation. As this projects shows, neither climate change, nor its impacts are domestic issues, yet it is one which we continue to view through a national lens. Our economy is both global and hugely influential over the natural world. The vast network of processes and interconnections that make up the global economy not only underpin and distribute the production of carbon, but shape its impacts also, distributing processes of production - and the environmental impacts that go with them - to places far from where those goods are ultimately used. The goal is both to exemplify the complexity of the processes that shape environmental change - and in doing so, to highlight the ill fit of the national accounting mechanisms used to measure it - but also to raise the question of responsibility. How environmental degradation is measured and how its costs are attributed and managed are two elements within the same equation. By drawing on three distinct cases of the trade-environment nexus, Disaster Trade has aimed to highlight the shortcomings of systems of governance which implement domestic environmental standards, whilst neglecting to regulate global systems of trade. In pursuit of a new approach, each of the investigations here explored distinct dimensions of this issue. The first case examined here concerns the rapidly growing phenomenon of brick importation from outside the UK. Once self sufficient in terms of brick production, the UK has since the great recession of 2008 seen production fall behind demand. As a result, the UK has now risen to become the world's largest importer of bricks, importing a total of xxx in 2019. Moreover, these bricks are coming from further and further afield. Bricks imported from outside the EU increased more than tenfold between 2015 and 2019, from 3,088,902 to 32,942,280: a low value, high weight trade that generates carbon on an enormous scale. Produced in largely unregulated kilns and shipped thousands of miles by boat, a three-kilogram house brick imported from outside the EU has a carbon cost three times higher than one produced domestically. Worse still, they carry with them a legacy of local environmental destruction and human exploitation on a scale that the UK has long since eliminated domestically, yet on which the goods we consume continue to depend. In the case of Cambodia, the aim is to highlight the role of the country within a wider process of trade and environmental destruction. A garment labelled "Made in Cambodia" tells only a small part of a far larger, global story. Cambodia has no cotton fields, it neither produces, nor processes the raw materials which comprise its clothes. Rather, these materials have come in many cases from as far away as the United States, Ivory Coast or Brazil. In large part, those materials come from China: a country whose status as 'the world's factory' has come at a heavy environmental cost. With China now committed to net zero in the next four decades, many of these high emission and environmentally damaging processes are being moved to countries with a net carbon budget remaining. Just as the UK did before it, China is therefore beginning to outsource emissions and environmental degradation, moving a problem in such a way that - through a national accounting lens - it appears to be solving. The final investigation of this study explores the production of Ceylon tea in Sri Lanka's central highlands. Long a central pillar of the Sri Lankan economy, the tea trade has suffered in recent years, as the impacts of climate change increase costs and reduce yields. Tea plantations have begun to decline in response, yet as land use in the highlands changes, the impacts of climate change are further intensified. Former tea plantations are now a major risk factor for the growing problem of landslides: an economically destructive and lethal phenomenon, closely associated with a declining trade introduced by British colonisers and still enjoyed daily in British homes. These examples are applied as powerful cases studies to highlight the importance of a globalised system of environmental trade regulation and the impacts of a system that does not extend beyond national borders.
Sector Government, Democracy and Justice
 
Description Fostering Inter-Departmental Collaboration on Trade and Human-Environmental Impacts
Geographic Reach National 
Policy Influence Type Contribution to a national consultation/review
Impact The project has been working closely with the Independent Anti Slavery Commissioner, in order to develop an inter-governmental policy platform through which to tackle climate change impacts, environmental regulation and supply chain reporting through the same platform. As well as liaising with the Commissioner, this partnership is working towards the development of a policy platform which will assess the human and environmental impacts of trade in a manner that cross cuts government departments, in particular, DEFRA, FCDO, BEIS and IASC. In addition to this, IASC are working with the project to develop policy briefs targeted at specific parliamentary Special Working Groups, in order to work towards legislation on supply chains and the human-environmental impacts of trade. In February 2022, the results of this award were published as evidence by the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Trade and Environment - one of only four academic submissions accepted to the call. In March 2023, Cotswold District Council became the first UK council to pass a motion requesting that the Council "actively encourages the use of ethical bricks for current and future developments within the district". It is hoped that this will be the first of several such motions around the country.
 
Description British Trade and Landslide Risk in Sri Lanka - Rapid Response Analysis for Policy Development (GCRF Impact Accelerator Grant)
Amount £6,500 (GBP)
Organisation University of Moratuwa 
Sector Academic/University
Country Sri Lanka
Start 09/2020 
End 09/2021
 
Description British Trade and Landslide Risk in Sri Lanka - Rapid Response Analysis for Policy Development 
Organisation University of Moratuwa
Country Sri Lanka 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution The main project which the proposed funds would develop, The Next Frontier of Climate Policy, builds on the WTO's recent conference on Natural Disasters and Trade (2018), to 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 as felt in both rural areas and the labour standards of industry. As the project has progressed, the possibility has arisen to add an additional component to the impact program, exploring the linkages between British trade and climate change impacts in Sri Lanka. Specifically, this component will investigate the role of climate change in increasing the prevalence and intensity of landslides in Sri Lanka and in particular the role of land use change related to tea and/or rubber plantations in shaping these impacts. Funded by a GCRF Impact Accelerator Grant, this involves three work packages: 1) Using secondary data, such as the United Nations ComTrade database and national company registration records, to establish the involvement of export-oriented companies - in particular British companies - in highland areas of Sri Lanka vulnerable to landslides. 2) Cross-referencing data on the landholdings of British companies in landslide-prone regions with geospatial data on landslide vulnerability and land use to identify areas of land use change related to the business operations of British companies that have exacerbated the likelihoods of impacts of landslides. 3) Undertaking a small number of qualitative interviews with local informants and officials in areas where British company activities is linked to landslide risk, in order to highlight local perspectives on these activities and risks.
Collaborator Contribution The key deliverables by the Sri Lanka team are: 1) An overview (c.5 pages) of Sri Lanka's international trading and export activities, with a particular focus on exports and trade with the UK. 2) A short report (c.20-30 pages, including figures and tables) on the linkages between trade, land use change, and landslide risk in Sri Lanka including statistics and maps on the relationship between landslide risk and land use change instigated specifically by British companies. Both deliverables will be used to a) make a case to UN Habitat Sri Lanka to develop a policy framework which recognises the heightened risk associated with living in proximity to certain forms of commercial land use and b) to make a case to our partners the FCDO in relation to the role of British trade activities confounding the aims of humanitarian and development assistance.
Impact Draft reports: 1) Inception report 2) Report on Tea exports, landslide risk and British plantations
Start Year 2020
 
Description Joining the Dots of the Environmental and Labour Policy in the UK government 
Organisation Independent Anti Slavery Commissioner
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Public 
PI Contribution Enthused by the early results of the project, the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner (IASC) has agreed to lead a program of work helping to disseminate the results of the project to government agencies and political figures.
Collaborator Contribution IASC are co-designing and disseminating policy briefs on the linkages between UK trade and investment and environmental and labour impacts. These will be disseminated and discussed at invited workshops bringing together IASC, FCDO, BEIS, DEFRA and others, with a view to generating a durable inter-agency policy platform for the regulation of overseas trade and environmental impacts. In addition, further briefing papers designed by IASC will be disseminated to specific parliamentary working groups, with a view to securing parliamentary legislation on supply chain management.
Impact Outcomes to be observed after the project launch in June
Start Year 2020
 
Description Importing Goods, Exporting Bads: The Environmental Impacts of UK Global Production Networks 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Policymakers/politicians
Results and Impact Gave a talk to Surrey County Council on UK environmental impacts in global production networks, as part of the Surrey Green Strategy development and dissemination process.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
 
Description Major clothing brands contribute to deforestation in Cambodia, report finds (Mongabay Expose) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact Worked with Mongabay to produce a further expose on illegal forest wood usage by major fashion brands.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
URL https://news.mongabay.com/2021/12/major-clothing-brands-contribute-to-deforestation-in-cambodia-repo...
 
Description New Report Directly Links Global Brands to Deforestation 
Form Of Engagement Activity A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact Worked with Vice World News to develop an expose from the findings of the project regarding the use of illegal forest wood by major fashion brands.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
URL https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmemg/cambodia-deforestation-fashion-lidl
 
Description Project Website: The Disaster Trade 
Form Of Engagement Activity Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact The project website Disastertrade.org hosts all outputs and findings related to the Disaster Trade project.

Professionally designed to communicate the complex issues tackled in the project in an engaging and accessible manner, the website includes a number of infographics with key statistics on the issue of embodied emissions and the impacts of trade worldwide.

It also hosts a regular "journal" concept in which preliminary findings are presented in a hybrid academic-public facing manner, in order to generate interest in the areas explored by the project, as research is underway.

Five extended research blogs have been published thus far and can be accessed here: https://www.disastertrade.org/journal

Once the project has been launched, we have agreed with editors at The Conversation that these will be published to a UK and international audience.

Thus far, the project website has attracted over 1600 views, across 43 countries.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2020
URL https://www.disastertrade.org/
 
Description The Disaster Trade: The Environmental Impacts of Three British Commodities 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact Gave a talk to the Harrow Sustainability Group on the topic "The Disaster Trade: The Environmental Impacts of Three British Commodities"
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
 
Description Trading Disaster - The Hidden Human and Environmental Footprint of British Trade 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact On May 20th 2020, The Disaster Trade undertook a webinar focused on the hidden human and environmental impact of global supply chains. Organised by the consultancy firm Ardea international, it attracted several dozen CEOs and business leaders interested in understanding the harms hidden by opaque supply chains.

The webinar abstract was as follows:

We live in an increasingly globalised world, in which trade connects distant environments thousands of miles apart. Yet they way we think about
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2020
URL https://www.disastertrade.org/events/event-one-z2z5h
 
Description Trading Disaster: The Hidden Human and Environmental Cost of British Trade (Webinar) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact A talk was delivered to a group of CEOs and business leaders convened by Ardea International, on the following theme:

Trading Disaster: The Hidden Human and Environmental Cost of British Trade (Webinar)

We live in an increasingly globalised world, in which trade connects distant environments thousands of miles apart. Yet they way we think about carbon emissions and environmental destruction is stuck in a different era: one where the domestic economy was the dominant driver of ecological change.

Part of the problem is the way we think about the processes of trade and commerce that connects our world. Supply chains look simple in theory, but the reality is far more complex, involving a whole range of actors beyond the key companies involved and the impacts of trade extend far more widely than is often appreciated.

These secondary impacts of trade often aren't fully understood in supply chain analysis, but as we have seen they can be extremely substantial. Every object we import, there is a three-dimensional embodied cost. First, there is a carbon cost which contributes to climate change and makes extreme weather more likely. Second, there is a local environmental cost, which exacerbates the effects of extreme weather. And finally there is a human cost, as people and communities absorb the impacts absorb the impacts of climate change, driven and intensified by global trade.

So the point then, is this: natural disasters are not natural. Far from it. Rather, when you see footage of floods, droughts, landslides, and houses destroyed by storms, remember that not only does trade contribute to the carbon emissions that make these events more likely, but also the local environmental and human conditions that make them more damaging and deadly. In many cases, therefore, as we import goods, we are effectively exporting disasters to the global South.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2020
URL https://www.disastertrade.org/events/event-one-z2z5h