THE ECOLOGICAL DEBT

In the 1980s, the South began to demand compensation for problems caused by the environmental harm caused by Northern lifestyles, such as the ozone hole, climate change and biodiversity loss. The South also wanted compensation for compromising their own development to safeguard the larger part of the world’s remaining natural wealth.

The Ecological Debt is the debt accumulated by northern, industrial countries toward third world countries on account of resource plundering, environmental damages, and the free occupation of environmental space to deposit wastes from the industrial countries (such as greenhouse gases).

The ecological debt arises from two separate problems. First, raw materials and other products exported from relatively poor countries are sold at prices that do not include compensation for local or global externalities. Second, rich countries use environmental space and services disproportionately, without payment, and without recognition of property rights (for instance, the free use of carbon dioxide absorption capacities). These problems can be combined in order to calculate the ecological debt in monetary terms.

Regarding ecologically-unequal trade, the following should be added up:

+ The costs required to reproduce or maintain the renewable resources that have been exported, for example the nutrients incorporated into agricultural exports.

+ The cost of the future lack of availability of natural resources that have been destroyed, for instance depleted oil or minerals or lost biodiversity. This is a difficult figure to compute, for several reasons. For oil and minerals, figures on existing reserves, estimates of possible technological obsolescence due to substitution, and discount rates are needed. For biodiversity it is necessary to know what has been destroyed.

+ Reparation costs or compensation for irreversible local damages caused by exports, for example sulfur dioxide emitted by copper smelters, mine tailings, health effects from pesticides used in flower cultivation, or water polluted by mercury from gold mining.

In connection with the lack of payment for environmental services or for calculations of the disproportionate use of environmental space, these factors must also be included:

+ Reparation costs or compensation for the impacts caused by toxic waste imports.

+ The costs of the disposal of gas residues (carbon dioxide, CFCs, etc.), assuming equal per capita rights to sinks. The "carbon debt" can be calculated based on the damage that will be done, or alternatively, based on the savings made by rich countries when they do not reduce emissions by half, as they should.

+ Reimbursement for the commercial use of information and knowledge about genetic resources, when they have been appropriated gratis.