Globalized Climate Precarity: Environmental Degradation, Disasters, and the International Brick Trade

Climate-linked disasters result when natural hazards meet socioeconomic precarity. Recognizing this, scholarship in recent years has emphasized how the precarity that turns climate-linked hazards into disasters is produced within the same global political economy that enables climate change. Nevertheless, despite growing interest in the ways in which the dynamics of global economic history shapes contemporary hazard vulnerability, less attention has been directed toward the dynamism of the contemporary global economy and particularly the ways in which global material flows shape environmental risk. From this standpoint, this article argues, first, the need to account for the economic dynamics of global trade in shaping the factors that intensify disaster risk, and second, the role of multiscalar agency. Exemplifying this issue through a…