Carbon emissions are the greatest environmental threat facing the planet and have been subject to ever more stringent regulation in recent decades. The UK, EU, and even the notoriously lagging US have made significant strides in changing the direction of their emissions, apparently bending down curves that had strained ever upwards for centuries. Yet the majority of these gains are a fallacy: a product of richer nations diminishing their share of global industry and ‘outsourcing’ carbon-intensive processes to the global South. These outsourced emissions now account for a quarter of global CO2 emissions, a figure that highlights the scale of wealthy nations’ ability to move emissions off their environmental books. There is even a name for this practice. The ability to effectively outsource emissions from richer to poorer nations has been described as ‘carbon colonialism’. Wealthier countries, overwhelmingly responsible for climate change both historically and currently, have set the terms of carbon mitigation at the negotiating table. Naturally, these terms favour the biggest emitters, allowing larger economies to offshore production processes to smaller ones, whilst maintaining the economic fruits of that production. In an era of global climate breakdown, this is as avoidable as it is pointless, yet the persistence of this line of thinking speaks to a centuries-old mindset. In a globalised system of unequal power, it is sufficient simply to outsource environmental problems like carbon. Bring in what is necessary and out, across the border goes (or stays) the rest.

We are used to the idea that climate vulnerability depends on geography, that certain parts of the world are more exposed to floods, droughts, or sea-level rise, and their populations are more exposed as a result. Yet, in reality, geography is only a part of the story. Within any given place, whether it be London or the Sri Lankan highlands, our experience of the climate is far from universal. Monsoon rains, even landslides, mean something quite different to someone surrounded by sturdy walls than they do to a person whose ceiling is in danger of collapsing. Economic inequality, the result of a long history of unequal accumulation, is the single biggest determinant of how climate change impacts the world’s populations. The poorer you are, the more vulnerable to climate change you are. If your livelihood is precarious, then you are climate precarious. Whether shivering in the safety of a London flat or braving the frontline of the climate crisis in the monsoon-lashed highlands of Sri Lanka, the environment we experience depends upon who we are and what we have.

All of us now depend on a globalised system of production that connects people and environments across thousands of miles. Clothing worn in Europe and the US is made in Bangladesh, Cambodia, or China. Raw materials are mined in one country, refined in another, and manufactured in a third. This is the global factory: a system of international production that has exploded in size and complexity in the last five decades, boosted by logistical innovation. Yet, despite its newfound interconnectedness, the roots of this system can be traced far further back in time, to the systems of unequal resource extraction set in place during the colonial era and which still dominate the power dynamics of global trade. This chapter will show how the rise of the global factory, in its colonial and post-colonial incarnations, is not, as it is often presented, a question of building up, but of breaking down: of people from nature, nature from itself, and of natural value from culture. The slow death of nature this instigates makes the labour force staffing the global factory self-sustaining, as the deepening pressures on rural livelihoods swell the crowds outside the factory gates a little more. Each flood, each drought, each unpredictable period of rainfall increases the pressure still further on workers in the global South, who have little choice but to accept the terms and conditions they are offered.

When it comes to climate change, the phrase ‘we’re all in it together’ is as widespread as it is misleading. Despite the language of inclusion, the ability to meaningfully participate in the direction of global climate governance is tightly controlled and grossly unequal. The global North dominates climate scholarship and advocacy, admitting only an elite few to participate. When it comes to the environment, this infrastructure of knowledge keeps the world moving on its current track, amplifying the voices of the status quo whilst denying alternative pathways a platform. And it is tremendously powerful. The rich world has no need to use force when it retains the capacity to set values. The dominance of rich nations’ environmental agendas not only shapes policy, but also sets the boundaries of what is possible in environmentalism. The terms of engagement with nature are set elsewhere and access to the environmental conversation often tightly constrained by economic circumstances. Long before the environment can be spoken for, the question of who gets to speak has already been decided. This chapter examines the voices that are excluded, what they have to say, and how climate policy might be different if we listened.

The global factory is consuming the planet. On the one hand, a vast increase in the rate of globalisation has seen once-domestic manufacturing processes extended across vast tracts of space, with multiple nations now involved in the production of a single product. Making room for all this production – and the consumption to which it is linked – has seen huge tracts of land repurposed for industry and agriculture: a process of global ecological destruction which has seen a 70 per cent decline in the global population of species since 1970. The result of all this is rising temperatures and the enhanced risk of natural hazards this brings. Yet, as fast as these processes accelerate, narratives of sustainability progress proliferate still faster: comforting myths that hide the dirtiest parts of the global factory from the eyes of the many people who would be horrified to know the truth. These myths are so widespread that they can feel inescapable. They are like mile-high walls around genuine change and meaningful action. Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. The way we view the world is a political choice, and like any political choice it can be unmade, if it can first be identified. Building on the lessons of the book so far, this final chapter presents six underlying myths that shape public and policy understanding of climate change. By shedding a new light on key axioms of climate thinking, these six myths are intended to unsettle our certainties, and reveal the blind spots in our understanding of environmental breakdown and the enormous injustices that lurk within them.

One of the central myths of our global economy is the idea of leading economies such as the UK having advanced beyond the dark and polluting days of industrial production. This is an idea promoted in both scholarship and culture, with post-industrial aesthetics celebrating the repurposing of former industrial spaces as sites of leisure and creativity. Yet, as this chapter shows, much of what appears to be progress is in reality a sideways movement, with the majority of industrial manufacturing sites in the global North remaining necessary, but having shifted to the global South. This hidden world of global production is the new frontier of the fight against climate breakdown. Not only does it undermine our ability to tackle global emissions, but smaller-scale impacts, too, are hidden amidst the complex logistics of our global production networks. In effect, climate change impacts, including the slow-burn disasters of droughts and floods, are outsourced by rich countries to producer countries in the global South. This introductory chapter will outline the disconnect between global narratives emphasising progress on sustainability and the dirty realities of contemporary production. As it explains, the global economy is not becoming greener, but better at hiding its impacts, channelling the worst effects of pollution and carbon emissions into complex international supply chains that are beyond the reach of regulators.

This chapter is an introduction to the concept of political gardening; it aims to inform the reader of the political turn in the urban gardening movement. It begins by contextualising the re-evaluation of ‘everyday space’ through the neoliberal processes of privatisation, devolution and entrepreneurialism. It then marries together these processes with the rise of academic interest in urban gardening and more recently the political aspect of this movement. The chapter then conflates the ideas of political gardening with injustice based on Rawls’ theory of social justice. Case study examples are then used to unpack the process of political gardening – in six iterative stages – in dealing with these injustices, arriving at a working definition of what political gardening is and that it is not just a term but also a process which participants undergo towards becoming engaged ‘democratised’ citizens.

This chapter presents a case study from Copenhagen on a community-based, but state-initiated, urban gardening effort to examine what such efforts mean for the minorities’ (the homeless and the ethnic minorities’) right to the city (Purcell, 2002; 2013), especially within the context of a traditionally welfare-driven, but increasingly neoliberalised urban context. David Harvey has described the right to the city as ‘not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart’s desire’ (Harvey, 2003). As such, in this chapter the concept of the ‘right to the city’ is operationalised as a measure or proxy for social and spatial justice to explore how the state-initiated community gardening effort in the Sundholm District shapes/secures/denies the homeless and the ethnic minorities’ ability to: (a) use and just be in the physical space of the garden (a public space); and (b) to translate this into access to the political space of urban governance (and governance of the garden space) where they can voice their needs/concerns.

Based on eighteen case studies the chapter discusses social values of urban wasteland areas. Therefore, it presents contemporary, post-human theories of vernacular models of democracy. Based on non-participatory observation, inventory of territorial markers and free-form interviews, processes, functions, users and possible development of urban wastelands are shown. The role of these places is perceived in two aspects, either as a substitute for the deficit of green areas or as their necessary functional complementation. Consequently, the main functions of these areas are informal activities, community gardening, extreme sports, and a place to live for homeless people, etc. Concluding, the authors state that in a development of urban wastelands, a new and open design approach is required. Future development of these spaces should preserve their values, such as: inclusiveness, freedom of creation, creative attitudes and social participation processes.

With the concept of Urban Agriculture (UA) growing in popularity, more cities and towns are exploring opportunities to enable the practice and transform neglected spaces into havens for produce. This chapter provides an insight into one such town, Todmorden, and its Incredible Edible movement, located in the heart of England. This chapter adopts a qualitative approach to critically exploring the IET movement and to understand its impact on Todmorden. We engaged with key actors and the public in order to ascertain views towards the schemes, analysing the positives and negatives of the model. Findings revealed that the scheme has an overwhelmingly positive impact on the town, with social, environmental and economic benefits. Furthermore, it was made clear that IET is helping to create a more just food movement in Todmorden, particularly through its free for all philosophy. However, some negatives were also highlighted during the course of the research, predominately around maintenance issues and a lack of perceived inclusivity in parts. Overall, the scheme was highly valued and seen as a powerful method for growing the wider UA movement; recommendations centred on further replicating the model and helping local food to prosper in similar locations globally.

Community has been presented as central to urban gardens’ practices and outcomes. This chapter considers what kind of communities result and whether they can tackle inequality, questioning their potential as an inclusive basis for challenging injustice. Answering these questions requires attention to activities forming garden communities and their spatiality. Informed by relational geography, the chapter challenges simplistic treatments of links between garden, community and place. Case studies from the UK demonstrate how facets enabling gardens to form communities result in exclusivity, unintentionally limiting who can access their benefits. Communities formed through collective place-making are found to struggle to extend across space and time, limiting their potential to reduce social inequalities. Achieving wider change requires work to push spatial relations across time to imagine a better future, and across space towards neighbours, social justice movements and structural causes of injustice.