Our Work/Environment Dialogues 2024: Market Impacts on Climate and Labor

“The Cost of Comfort: How Everyday Choices and Business Practices Impact the Environment and Labor” 

Background

This session is dedicated to unraveling the intricate nexus between the environment, labor rights, and the business of wellness and lifestyle. Our objective is to navigate the complex interplay of business practices and consumption patterns and show their profound impact on both the environment and workers. These consequences are frequently concealed from public discussion and often overlooked by consumers. 

During the webinar, we will delve into compelling stories and examples. One such journey will lead us through the production of açaí in Brazil, tracing its trajectory to the international market while exposing its direct impacts on both the environment and workers’ rights. We will also explore the cost of the fashion industry and the challenges faced by delivery workers in markets marked by heat and a lack of legal protections. This panel will uncover the intricate relationship between our everyday choices, labor dynamics, and their collective influence on our response to climate change, with a particular focus on the vulnerable position of workers in this evolving landscape. 

Live interpretation will be provided in English, Portuguese, French, and Indonesian.

Key questions 

• How can we raise awareness and foster responsible consumer choices in markets like the wellness and fashion industry, where the environmental and labor consequences of everyday decisions often go unnoticed? And how can we do this without weighing too much on individual responsibility—as if consumers were responsible for the entire environmental crisis—but also without taking big companies into account? 
• What actionable steps and policy changes can be implemented to ensure that business practices and consumption patterns are aligned with the environment and the protection of labor rights? And how can the consumers impact the companies’ behavior in order to guarantee better practices? 

Panelists’ profiles 

• Jazmín Acuña is one of the co-founders of El Surtidor, an online media outlet in Paraguay, that has been a pioneer in journalistic storytelling for younger audiences on mobile devices. She was a winner of the 2018 Gabo Award in innovation, the most prestigious in Latin America, for their work on deforestation in the Chaco. 
• Karl Mancini is an Italian documentary photographer based out of Rome and Buenos Aires. Since 2001 he has worked in more than 90 countries, with a particular preference for Asia and South America, as a freelance photojournalist and writer, following socio-historical and political events and focusing on issues such as gender violence (which he has worked on for 15 years) war aftermaths, minorities, human rights, environment, and migration. 
• Laurie Parsons is a senior lecturer in human geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Principal Investigator of various projects on the effect of climate change on the global economy, exposing the hidden environmental impacts of global production and unequal landscape of exposure to climate change impacts. His work highlights the subjectivities and inequalities that shape climate change impacts, channeling their worst impacts through the lens of pre-existing local and global precarities. 
• Maria Darrigo has been working with natural resource management and regional development projects for the last 15 years. Most of her work was conducted in the Amazon, focusing on education, the environment, climate change, quality of life for local people, and public policy implementation.

This webinar is part of a 3-event series, "Our Work/Environment Dialogues." To learn about related events and register, please click the links below:

• January 17: Getting to Just: Energy Transition and Its Impact on the Job Landscape and Labor Rights
• January 24: Work Relations, Coastal Communities, and Ocean Levels