Next Frontier of Climate Policy: Joining the Dots of Bricks, Trade and Embodied Emissions from Cambodia and Bangladesh to the UK, 2020-2021

Building on the achievements of the ESRC-DFID funded project Blood Bricks, in Cambodia and Safe and Sustainable Cities, in Bangladesh, this program aimed 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 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'. he project undertook an expanded supply chain analysis to highlight the social and environmental footprint of the UK's £1.4 billion of trade with Cambodia. It calculated the emissions embodied in bricks imported from Bangladesh, where brick production is associated with 'toxic fumes and atrocious working conditions'. The project also addressed 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. Additionally, it conducted independent fieldwork in study sites in Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka to explore environmental impacts and livelihoods associated with UK supply chains. Original photography was undertaken in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka to document these findings visually. The archived collection contains only the secondary data from open sources, reports, and selected photographs due to the need to protect the identities of participants and respect their privacy wishes. This selective approach ensures compliance with ethical standards while allowing for a broad dissemination of the findings.

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.