We are living, for the first time in history, in an urban world. Urban areas and their construction are increasingly recognised as major contributors to climate change, with the built environment currently responsible for 39% of carbon emissions worldwide. Moreover, both the impact of the built environment and responsibility for it are becoming increasingly geographically complex. By 2050, "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. Nevertheless, the lack of legal coverage for imported materials exemplifies how bulk imports of this sort fall through the cracks of environmental governance.

Starting on International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Disaster Trade is beginning work to explore a new and vital nexus of trade and environmental hazards: the Sri Lankan highlands, where international tea and rubber exports play a key role in in exacerbating the risk of landslides.

Where do your clothes come from? It’s a question that can apparently be answered with an awkward neck twist and a glance at a label. Yet like so many of the items we purchase and use on a daily basis, the single country origin label sewn into a shirt is an illusion, just one stop along a global journey of assembly that is anathema to the sustainable production and a key stumbling block in the fight against climate change. Understanding this hidden geography is the first step to tackling the carbon footprint concealed within the hidden underwiring of our global economy.

Cambodia has a power problem. Since last year, four coal burning power plants have been proposed by the Cambodian government: three planned within Cambodia’s borders and a further plant, capable of a monstrous 2.4 GW of annual power generation, intended to be based in Laos for Cambodian supply. The transition to coal will be embodied in every one of these garments we import, adding substantially to the carbon footprint of UK consumption.

We live in an increasingly globalised world, in which trade connects distant environments thousands of miles apart. Yet they way we think about carbon emissions and environmental destruction is stuck in a different era

Our new project, the Disaster Trade, sets out to highlight the close inter-linkages between “natural” disasters and trade. But before we can start to answer this question, we need to go back a step and ask a prior one. In a world we know to be so globalised, why is international trade not a bigger part of the global conversation on climate change and what can we do to change this?