The Disaster Trade: an Overview

A worker at a Cambodian plantation supplying a major British sugar company

Welcome to the Disaster Trade.

This is a project that sets out to explore simple truths about some of the world’s most complex systems: our internationally connected economy of goods and commodities. We argue that to understand climate change, you have to understand it through the lens of this complex system. Specifically, there are two points at the core of our project:

Trade is a key contributor to climate change.

As the world becomes more interconnected, more and more of the emissions we produce are produced overseas. On average, one quarter of the global carbon footprint is embodied in imported goods. In the UK, this is even higher. In 2016, 46% of UK emissions were produced overseas, up from just 14% in 1990.

Moving these goods contributes to climate change in itself. The carbon footprint of freight alone accounted for 7% of global emissions in 2010 and is expected to increase fourfold by 2050. This means that the good news story of the UK’s emissions reductions is strongly misleading. Although the government releases figures indicating a 44% reduction in the UK’s carbon footprint between 1990 and 2019, the true figure, accounting for the emissions we consume, is only 15%.

But the carbon footprint alone doesn’t tell the whole story.

The local effect of trade and investment are worsening the impact of climate change on poverty and livelihoods. Trade liberalisation is linked to deforestation, which not only accounts for 12% of total carbon emissions worldwide, but also worsens the local impacts of climate change. In addition, the environmental cost of trade in many cases exacerbates the impacts of climate change in local settings. 

By degrading local environments, many British trading practices, make the effects of climate change worse, reducing overseas populations’ resilience to the impacts of the changing climate and making natural disasters more likely. The result is that when we import goods, we are effectively exporting disasters: not only contributing to climate change globally, but also exacerbating its impacts locally.