Project Summary
Concrete Impacts is a UKRI-Economic Social Research Council funded collaboration between Lancaster and Durham Universities examining the socio-ecological effects of military supply chains and wider environmental damage.
At the heart of this research project is ‘geo-political ecology’ – defined as the ‘…synergies between political ecologists’ careful attention to multi-scale environmental politics and the discursive-material co-constitution of global institutional geopolitics.’ (Bigger and Neimark 2018).
Our novel approach uses supply chain analysis – usually reserved as an economic management tool – as a way to measure socio-environmental impact in highly affected population locations or ‘hotspots.’ We will deliver a comprehensive open-sourced datalab that is a user-friendly source for climate, environmental and socio-economic costs of US military procurement of sand, water and cement in a theatre of war.
The purpose of Concrete Impacts is to examine how sand, water & cement were procured and delivered through military supply chains in Iraq and beyond. We do so by developing maps of military supply chains and pinpointing source material hotspots. We will calculate the environmental and pollution footprint of these materials using a novel hybrid Life-Cycle Analysis (LCA).
We arealso co-leading a major initiative to track, analyse and close the military emissions gap, and demand that governments disclose their military emissions data to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Learn more here: militaryemissions.org
Watch a short video about our activities alongside colleagues at the Conflict and Environment Observatory: https://youtu.be/1DesJ4KAqnM
The Research team includes: Benjamin Neimark, Oliver Belcher, Kirsti Ashworth, Reuben Larbi & Patrick Bigger
To find out more: https://www.concreteimpacts.org/
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