7.1.5 How do our actions here affect people elsewhere and the planet?

On 24 April 2013, a garment factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, called Rana Plaza collapsed. More than 1,100 workers died, most of them young women who sewed clothes for well-known international brands. The building's owners had ignored warnings that cracks in the walls made it unsafe. Managers told workers to continue working in the dangerous conditions or lose their wages.

Every decision we make and every action we take has the potential to impact people and places far away because of the many global connections in today’s economy.

• Lifestyles and consumption patterns (Figure 2): Different lifestyles and consumer choices place different demands on land, energy, water, and materials, often located far away. For example, streaming films and games or using AI relies on data centres that may be based in other countries and powered by electricity from coal, gas that worsen global warming, or that use large amounts of water. The digital habits of people in a country can therefore increase energy use, emissions and water extraction in communities far away, contributing to pressure on planetary boundaries (Section 1.2.7)

• Global supply chains (Figure 3): Goods we use every day are often produced across several countries, linking consumers to distant workers and ecosystems (Section 7.1.3). The Rana Plaza collapse showed how competition between suppliers for orders from international brands can push factory owners to cut costs on safety and pay. Similar pressures shape less visible supply chains too. Cod caught in the North Atlantic is often shipped to China, where workers process and refreeze it for a fraction of the labour cost in Europe, before it is shipped back to be sold in European supermarkets. The long transport adds to fuel use and emissions to a product that could have been processed close to where it was caught. It also means a fish sold as a product of China may have started its journey somewhere else entirely, information a shopper has no way of seeing.

• Financial decisions: Money moves across borders through investments made by banks and institutional investors like pension funds and insurance companies (Section 6.3.2). For example, when a pension fund based in Germany invests money in a Brazilian logistics company, it can help finance new ports or railways. These projects may support economic growth and create jobs, but they can also change land use, accelerate Amazon deforestation, and affect nearby communities who had no say in and little or no benefit from the investment.

• Public policy: State rules shape how goods, money, and people move between countries. For example, agricultural subsidies in wealthy countries can lower the price of exported food. This can make it harder for farmers in lower-income countries to compete, affecting rural jobs and incomes and sometimes encouraging more industrial farming with environmental damage. Weaker environmental and labour regulations in one part of the world may attract multinational corporations (MNCs) looking to lower production costs to maximise profits. This can incentivise policymakers in other regions to lower their own standards in a ‘race to the bottom’.

• Care: How societies organise and value care work inside their borders has effects well beyond them. Long periods of state budget austerity (Section 5.2.1), low pay, and poor working conditions in Europe have contributed to staff shortages in health and care systems there.  To keep hospitals and care facilities running, states recruit doctors, nurses and other care workers from other countries.  This can ease worker shortages in care, while increasing staff shortages in the countries those workers leave, negatively affecting access to care there (Section 2.3.3).

Single people do not reshape global supply chains, financial markets, or countries’ policies on care work. One shopper choosing a lower-impact product doesn't change a supply chain. One saver's pension choice doesn't redirect financial markets. One employee's request doesn't change a company's suppliers. One citizen's vote doesn't rewrite a subsidy. One family valuing care work doesn't fix how a country funds its care system. 

What changes these systems is many people acting through provisioning institutions: households, markets, commons, and the state. Every time you buy something, do a job, invest money, join others, or support a policy, you're acting and interacting with other people and these connections can spark more change than you might think.

Acting through roles in institutions and networks

Within provisioning institutions, you take on different roles. As a consumer in a market, your everyday purchases place demands on land, energy, water, and materials somewhere else, feeding into lifestyle and consumption impacts. As an employee, whether your workplace sits in the market or the state, you might have some influence over the supplies the organisation purchases, called procurement. As an investor, even indirectly through a pension fund one day, your money finances production all over the world. As a citizen acting through the state or with communities in the commons, you can support or resist policies that affect large groups of people.  And as a role model in your household or wider community, your actions impact what others think is normal, whether that's how much you fly, what you buy, or how you value care work.

This is where roles connect to networks (Section S.7). Each person acting in a role is a single node, or part of a system. What determines whether that action adds up to real pressure on a supply chain, a market, or a policy is the network it’s a part of. How many other people are acting in the same way? How connected are they to each other? How visible is their combined action? A role model's influence, for example, works by pulling others into that network, creating new social norms. Each person who visibly acts differently makes it easier for the next person to join in, growing the network rather than acting alone.

Power and responsibility are not shared evenly

Power is not shared evenly, and neither is responsibility. Wealthier countries, firms, and investors receive most of the benefits of these five global exchange connections: cheaper goods, financial returns, access to labour. Less powerful communities are more likely to carry the environmental damage, insecure work, and rising costs of global exchanges. This power imbalance also exists within each institution and role. A hospital's head of procurement holds far more influence over supply chains than a new procurement employee. A large institutional investor like a pension fund moves markets in ways no individual saver can. A state or a multinational company can rewrite the rules of trade, finance, or subsidy on its own, in a way no network of individual citizens or consumers can fully match.

States, large companies, and financial institutions hold the most concentrated power to set these rules. That means they carry the greatest responsibility, both for the harm these connections can cause and for using that power to reshape the rules toward wellbeing for people and the planet. Individuals, especially networked together, still have influence, but they do not carry the same responsibility as those who hold the most power.

Concept: Systems, power

Skills: Thinking skills (transfer, critical thinking)

Time: 25-30 minutes, depending on how many roles students explore and how they share their thinking in pairs or small groups

Type: Individual, pairs, or small group

Global-social and global-ecological connections

Note: There is a printable version of this activity here, so students can draw arrows to show their connections.

This activity asks you to identify various roles in the economy, the mechanisms through which those roles are connected to other people and places, and the impacts of those connections. The lists below do not have every kind of role, connection or impact. They just get you thinking about the diverse ways we are connected to people and places elsewhere.

1. Choose one role from the provisioning institution and role list. Draw an arrow from that role to a connection in the middle list that this role engages with. Then draw a second arrow from that connection to an impact on the right. Some roles connect to more than one system: if you can, draw a second or third chain from the same role before moving on.

2. Choose a second role, from a different provisioning institution this time. Repeat the same steps, drawing as many chains as you can find.

3. Compare your chains with a partner or in a small group. Talk about the connections and impacts you each chose, and whether you found different arrows for the same role.

4. Look at your two roles again. Which one do you think holds more power within the connections you drew? What makes you think that?

Ideas for longer activities and projects are listed in Subtopic 7.5 coming soon

• Leveraging agency for climate change mitigation - This paper introduces the ‘a-frame’, the idea that people can act on climate through five roles, as a citizen, employee, investor, consumer, and role model. It argues that power and agency are unevenly spread, both between these roles and within them, and that individual action matters most when it connects people across a network. Difficulty level: medium

• What to do when climate change feels unstoppable -  In this ca. 12 minute TEDx Talk, climate activist Clover Hogan explores eco-anxiety. She shows how it can paralyse someone, or be channelled into a mindset that makes action feel possible. As you watch, think about your own mindset. Does it shape whether you act in any of the roles from this section, before you even ask whether that action should be individual or collective? Difficulty level: easy

• Who made your clothes? - A ca. 5-minute Fashion Revolution video, made a year after Rana Plaza. Consumers and campaigners explain why so few people know who made their clothes, and why asking brands matters. Difficulty level: easy

Doughnut Economics Action Lab. (2022, April). Doughnut unrolled: Dimensions of the four lenses (Version 1.0). https://doughnuteconomics.org/tools/doughnut-unrolled-dimensions-of-the-four-lenses

Kukowski, C. A., Nielsen, K. S., Kühne, S. J., Hogan, C., van der Linden, S., Whitmarsh, L., Zwingenberger, G., Creutzig, F., & Nicholas, K. A. (2026). Leveraging agency for climate change mitigation. Nature Climate Change. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400531814_Leveraging_Agency_for_Climate_Change_Mitigation

Liu, J. Q., Hull, V., Batistella, M., et al. (2013). Framing Sustainability in a Telecoupled World. Ecology & Society. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-05873-180226

Coming soon!