Laurie Parsons is a senior lecturer in human geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Latest by this author
Rich countries have exported climate breakdown through extractive industries, creating a “carbon colonialism.”
Laurie Parsons is a senior lecturer in human geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, and principal investigator of the projects The Disaster Trade: The Hidden Footprint of UK Imports and Hot Trends: How the Global Garment Industry Shapes Climate Vulnerability in Cambodia.
In these and other projects, he explores 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.
He is the author of Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown (Manchester University Press, 2023). He is the co-author of Going Nowhere Fast: Inequality in the Age of Translocality and Climate Change in the Global Workplace (Oxford University Press, 2020), which was shortlisted for the EuroSEAS 2021 Social Science book prize. An edited collection, Climate Change in the Global Workplace was published with Routledge in 2021.
He was the co-investigator of the project Blood Bricks: Untold Stories of Modern Slavery and Climate Change from Cambodia, which examined brick kiln work in Cambodia through the lens of the contested politics of climate change on socio-economic inequalities, patterns of work and mobilities. In 2020, Blood Bricks was awarded the Times Higher Education Prize for Research Project of the Year.
Parsons’ work seeks to explore how climate change is articulated through the social, political and economic systems within which we live. This is therefore work which highlights the subjectivities and inequalities which shape climate change impacts, channeling their worst impacts through the lens of pre-existing local and global precarities.
Strongly committed to policy engagement, Parsons has conducted large-scale projects examining inequalities in Cambodia’s economic development for Transparency International, Plan International, Save the Children, CARE International, ActionAid, the IDRC and the Royal University of Phnom Penh, among others.
Find him on X: @lauriefdparsons.External
Rich Countries Are Exporting Climate Breakdown to the Global South
Co-authors: Cal Turner and Sara Van Horn | Jacobin | June | 2023
Jacobin interviews Parsons on the subject of carbon colonialism. From waste to deforestation to drastic flooding, wealthy countries of the Global North are outsourcing the impacts of their resource extraction to poorer countries in the Global South.
Towards Climate Mobilities in Geography
Progress in Human Geography | 2018
This paper uses the case of a Cambodian beggar to show how recent developments across three fields have laid the groundwork for the structural and emotional dimensions of climate change response to be engaged with under a coherent theoretical rubric.
The Conversation | December | 2021
Laws in the UK apply strictly within that countryʼs borders but fail to account for labor and environmental abuses in the global supply chain. The only way to regulate this properly is to recognize and address carbon colonialism.
The Conversation | June | 2023
Social factors make some people more vulnerable than others to exposure to extreme heat or cold. Those with fewer resources are less able to afford protection. Not only that, disadvantaged populations tend to have more health problems and less healthy working environments.
Publications by this author
The Hidden Footprint of UK Production Overseas
Co-authors: Alice Moncaster, Ian Cook, Luis Scungio, Mahmudol Hasan Rocky, Ricardo Safra De Campos, Tamim Billah and Tasneem Siddiqui | Royal Holloway, University of London | October | 2021
Focusing on imports from Cambodia, Sri Lanka and the South Asian ‘brick belt’, this project examines how British trade shapes the so-called ‘natural disasters’ that afflict the UK’s trading partners. As it exemplifies, the UK’s trade in garments, bricks and tea serves to displace emissions and environmental degradation, whilst intensifying the impacts of natural hazards linked to climate change. These complex impacts constitute the UK’s hidden disaster footprint.
How the Global Garment Industry Shapes Climate Change Vulnerability in Cambodia
Co-authors: Joe Buckley, Sabina Lawreniuk and Sok Serey | Royal Holloway, University of London; University of Nottingham | April | 2022
In response to mounting public pressure, companies have moved rapidly to launch media campaigns highlighting their commitment to a green future. The global garment industry is no different. Behind much of this “greenwashing” remains the reality that the garment supply chain was designed to take advantage of production in countries where labor and environmental regulations are lax and to minimize brand responsibility for the practices of supplier factories.
Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality
Co-authors: Sabina Lawreniuk | Oxford University Press | August | 2020
Tracing a “miraculous” decade of development in Cambodia, one of the world’s fastest growing economies since the turn of the millennium, this book brings together a broad toolbox of data to make a case for inequality not as an economic phenomenon, but as a ‘total social fact’ in which stories, stigma, obligation, and assets combine to lock social structures in place.
How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown
Manchester University Press | May | 2023
Carbon colonialism explores the murky practices of outsourcing a countryʼs 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, the book shows 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.
Media by this author
Feature | April | 2023
Parsons explores 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.
Interview | December | 2023
Rachel Donald and Parsons discuss the tensions between a global political economy, national legal jurisdictions, and a populace drowning in information. Taking examples from his book, Carbon Colonialism, Laurie explains how the people footing the climate bill are local and indigenous people around the world who are suffering under the extractive actions of corporations and the reticence of national governments to act. He also reveals the history of greenwashing, before giving an excellent analysis of the deliberate divide and conquer tactic separating land, labour and capital has long driven wealth into the world’s most powerful nations.
Feature | June | 2022
In this lecture, Parsons scrutinizes the claims of the UK that they have reduced carbon emissions. He references globalized trade and complex supply chains, which are driven by wealthy countries. As we are geopolitically interconnected, our emissions are not localised.
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