Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown

Teams

Around the world, leading economies are announcing significant progress on climate change. World leaders are queuing up to proclaim their commitment to tackling the climate crisis, pointing to data that shows the progress they have made. Yet the atmosphere is still warming at a record rate, with devastating effects on poverty and precarity in the world’s most vulnerable communities. Are we being deceived? Climate change is devastating the planet, and globalisation is hiding it. In this seminar, I will explore the murky practices of outsourcing a country’s environmental impact, where emissions and waste are exported from rich countries to poorer ones; a world in which corporations and countries are allowed to maintain a clean, green image while landfills in the world’s poorest countries continue to expand, and droughts and floods intensify under the auspices of globalisation, deregulation and economic growth. Taking a wide-ranging, culturally engaged approach to the topic, I will show how this is not only a technical problem, but a problem of cultural and political systems and structures – from nationalism to economic logic – deeply embedded in our society. 

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Speaker

Laurie Parsons is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Principal Investigator of numerous research projects – including Disaster Trade, Hot Trends, and Oppressive Heat – exploring climate change in a globalised world. In these and other projects, he examines the experience of climate change in the global economy, exposing the hidden environmental impacts of global production and unequal landscape of exposure to climate change impacts. Taking a wide-ranging, culturally engaged approach to the topic, his work shows how climate change is far more than a technical problem, but a problem of cultural and political systems and structures - from nationalism to economic logic - deeply embedded in our society. 

Chair

Dinar Kale works in the area of entrepreneurship and innovation in healthcare technology industries with extensive research on industrial innovation, industrial-health policy linkages and health access in developing countries. Prof. Kale has researched and published extensively on issues that influence entrepreneurship, innovation and development of healthcare industries based in low-middle-income countries. One strand of his research has focused on exploring links between migration, entrepreneurship, and innovation through the prism of tacit knowledge. His recent research explores the role of trans-local migrant entrepreneurship in improving the economic competitiveness of local economies in the global south.  Over the years, Prof. Kale has published in leading journals in the area of Business Studies (BS), Development Studies (DS) and Innovation Studies (IS), such as the British Journal of Management, Research Policy, World Development, Industrial and Corporate Change, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Innovation and Development and Technology Analysis and Strategic Management.