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

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.