Rich Nations Running Up "Ecological Debt"

Photo: Uthara Srinivasan

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The impact of ecological resources damaged every year in poor nations is a greater financial burden than national debt, a new analysis has found. What's worse, it is rich nations that are causing the damage in poor nations, either directly or indirectly.

The study doesn't make any extraordinary claims. Globalization has ushered in an era when rich nations can extract the resources of poor nations, or products produced from those natural resources, with greater ease than ever before. (During the study period, 1961-2000, world population and average per capita gross world product doubled, demonstrating how rapidly the rate of consumption of natural resources has increased.) What the study does do is quantify the "ecological debt" that rich nations owe to poor nations for the first time, its authors, led by Thara Srinivasan, say.

That figure: $47 trillion.

For comparison's sake, the U.S. debt, which is at a record high, just eclipsed $9 trillion in September.

The results will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In economics, externalities are costs not accounted for in the price of goods and services. You pay for the fish you eat, but not the loss of the next generation of fish. You pay for electricity, but not for the acid rain produced by smokestack emissions. You pay for a new door, but not the loss of the trees and forest ecosystem that result.

Global warming is the mother of all externalities, which is why the U.S. and the world is considering cap-and-trade schemes for curtailing carbon emissions, or carbon taxes, or other efforts to put a value on something that now is spewed without compensation to those harmed.

In addition to climate change, the researchers considered ozone depletion, industrial farming, deforestation, overfishing and destruction of mangroves.

In most cases the goods and services consumed in rich countries resulted in new burdens on poor countries that aren't accounted for in global trade.

"In a world tightly knit by phenomena such as climate change and globalization, much ecosystem change is driven by activities beyond a nation’s borders or within its borders but beyond its control," the authors write. "This raises equity concerns over the global atmospheric commons and the displacement of damages by global trade. Our analysis highlights the distribution of impacts across income groups, with important implications for 'ecological debts' between groups."

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