Global trade in the Anthropocene: A review of trends and direction of environmental factor flows during the Great Acceleration

John Brolin,Astrid Kander

doi:10.1177/2053019620973711

Abstract

Global trade is a neglected topic in debates on the Anthropocene, but plays an implicit role in several suggested definitions of it. Trade’s role in shifting environmental burdens around the globe differed substantially between the Columbian Exchange (1492−1800), the Industrial Revolution (~1800−1950) and the Great Acceleration (post-1950). However, this systematic state-of-the-art review shows that the more than 350 global studies of trade-embedded environmental factors all centre on the Great Acceleration. An underlying concern here is whether environmental factor flows are to the economic and/or environmental benefit of all, a case of the rich exploiting the poor, or merely the inadvertent consequence of differences in environmental efficiency. We point out similarities in the trends and direction of flows between major world regions and between developed and developing countries. Factors such as land, virtual water, HANPP and eutrophying pollutants that are related to the organic economy (or direct biomass flows), primarily flow from regions where population density is low to where it is high, and are only secondarily affected by affluence. Indicators such as energy, airborne pollutant emissions and greenhouse gasses that are related to the mineral economy (fossil fuel, metal and mineral use) tend to flow from developing to developed countries, and are explained either by higher consumption rates or greater environmental efficiency in affluent countries, which has similar consequences for net flows. We weave the shifting trends and directions of flows during the Great Acceleration into a coherent story. Finally, returning to the period before the Great Acceleration, we argue the need for global studies of trade-embedded factor flows before 1950 to test ideas on the character and origins of the Anthropocene, and to accomplish this suggest either geographically extending quantitative long-term national and/or commodity studies, or environmentally extending recently compiled global monetary bilateral trade data for the pre-1950 period.

Highlights

The study of global trade-embedded environmental factors tries to unite the study of humanity’s global environmental impact with that of the global integration and division of production and consumption. It adopts an expanding flora of environmental indicators or ‘factors’, including materials or energy contained within traded goods (‘direct flows’), or materials, land, water, energy, pollutants and greenhouse gasses (GHG) used or emitted in their production (‘indirect flows’) (Arto et al, 2012; Malik et al, 2019; Moran et al, 2013; Wiedmann and Lenzen, 2018) and is central in many current debates on carbon leakage, pollution havens, unequal exchange, the environmental Kuznets curve, dematerialisation and food, resource- and water-security
Global trade has been an at least implicit prerequisite in many definitions of the Anthropocene, partly following from the self-imposed constraint that environmental impact must be both synchronous and global in extent
Studies were retained if: 1) they present empirical estimates of actual flows; 2) these flows refer to totals of the respective embedded environmental factor, excluding studies of individual commodities or groups of commodities; 3) flows are between nation states or groups of nation states, excluding flows on subnational or municipal level, or between individual industries or industrial sectors; 4) they are ‘global’ in the sense that a significant number of countries are included with representatives from several continents

Summary

Introduction

The study of global trade-embedded environmental factors tries to unite the study of humanity’s global environmental impact with that of the global integration and division of production and consumption. It adopts an expanding flora of environmental indicators or ‘factors’, including materials or energy contained within traded goods (‘direct flows’), or materials, land, water, energy, pollutants and greenhouse gasses (GHG) used or emitted in their production (‘indirect flows’) (Arto et al, 2012; Malik et al, 2019; Moran et al, 2013; Wiedmann and Lenzen, 2018) and is central in many current debates on carbon leakage, pollution havens, unequal exchange, the environmental Kuznets curve, dematerialisation and food-, resource- and water-security. Trade volumes and trade’s share of GDP were still small (Figure 1), and rather than the transfer of resources (cf. Nichols and Gogineni, 2018: 113) global trade’s role in environmental impact consisted primarily in the transfer of (live) species, including crops, diseases and people (notably African slaves and their crops; Carney and Rosomoff, 2017), resulting in biological homogenisation and persistent changes in the global distribution of species (Lewis and Maslin, 2015a, 2015b, 2018; cf. Zalasiewicz et al, 2015)

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