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

2017年ESRC-DIFD项目“血砖”通过对世界上最易受气候影响的国家之一的欠债制砖工人的集中关注（Kreft等人，2014年），为全球碳排放与建筑环境之间的联系提供了令人信服的证据。两年多后，随着“气候紧急情况的加深”（《卫报》，2019年），这两种相互关联的趋势越来越多地影响着当代世界的环境风险。全球碳排放量下降的速度不够快，去年达到了历史最高水平（Le quacri<s:1>等人，2018），而“快速城市化增加了数十亿人的气候风险”（《联合国气候变化框架公约》，2017:1）。今天，建筑环境占全球碳排放量的39%（世界绿色建筑委员会，2019年），而“隐含碳”——在生产、运输和安装建筑材料过程中释放的碳排放——到2050年将占建筑碳足迹的一半。以这种方式将气候变化和建筑环境联系起来，使许多国家（尤其是英国）的气候政策处于不利地位。英国是世界第五大隐含二氧化碳进口国（Moran et al., 2018），尽管自1997年以来，英国生产的商品和服务的碳排放量下降了35%，但与进口相关的温室气体排放量同期上升了28%。预计英国脱欧后，贸易向非欧洲伙伴的转移将加剧这一差异，最终导致进口排放量增加5%至11% （Fezzinga et al., 2019）。在ESRC-DFID资助的柬埔寨“血砖”项目和孟加拉国“安全与可持续城市”项目取得成果的基础上，该项目旨在将这些项目的国内效益向上和向外扩展，以研究贫困、环境可持续性和生计脆弱性之间的相互关系。将供应链分析、隐含排放和建筑方面的专家聚集在一起，与政府和行业合作，研究国际贸易对环境和人类的影响，影响活动将不仅从碳排放的角度出发，而且从贫困和不平等的角度出发，强调国际贸易和投资如何服务，正如我们之前的资助所示。由于“气候变化与社会不平等之间的密切联系”，加剧了全球南方的贫困（Islam和Winkel， 2017）。它将通过两个示例来演示这一点。首先，它将委托扩大供应链分析，以突出英国与柬埔寨14亿英镑贸易的社会和环境足迹。其次，它将计算从孟加拉国进口的砖所含的排放量，在孟加拉国，砖的生产与“有毒烟雾和恶劣的工作条件”有关（气候和清洁空气委员会，2019年），此外，人们越来越担心空气污染和砖业大量收集表土对当地人民维持传统生计能力的影响（达卡论坛报，2019年）。在一系列针对政策制定者、建筑行业利益相关者和公众的研讨会和活动中，拟议的计划将强调这一现象日益增长的重要性及其对可持续发展目标8（与劳工权利和体面工作有关）、11（关于可持续城市和社区）和13（关于气候行动）的相关影响。在此过程中，它将展示气候变化和贸易如何交织在一起，在遭受脆弱性和贫困的人群中成为威胁倍增器。具体而言，它将引起更广泛的关注，即这些国家的砖生产的特点是高水平的排放，当地环境退化和滥用劳工权利（Brown等人，2018;Bales, 2016），最终目标是在气候变化，贫困和贸易的界面上实现全新的政策思维。

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.