Environmental damage: pollution, degradation, extinction
Spatial level of damage: global, continental, national, regional, local Type of ecosystem and ecosystem services
Equity rights: several interpretations for different types of ecosystems and services
Actors (creditors and debtors): countries, present and future generations, social classes, enterprises
Quantifi cation: physical units or monetary accounts Time: different time periods to be considered
Source: Adapted and developed from Paredis et al. (2004).
Indicators of pollution, exhaustion and degradation
(DPSIR)†
Ecological footprint Environmental space Monetary
evaluation
Monetary evaluation
Analysis of material flows ECOLOGICAL DEBT
Ecological damage Use of equitable rights
Note: † DPSIR (driving forces–pressures–state–impacts–responses) is a commonly employed framework for assessing and managing environmental problems.
Source: Paredis et al. (2004).
Figure 10.1 Calculating ecological debt
has resulted from a series of contributions, or diff erent and diverse viewpoints, that are mutually complementary, and without which it would be unthinkable or inconceivable.
That is, this concept is as much based on the idea of the ‘carrying capacity’ of Earth’s ecosystems and systems of biophysical accounting, such as the ecological ‘footprint’ or
‘space’, as on the analysis of material fl ows. It is a new concept that is directly related to the critical viewpoint of ecological economics, which links the economic dynamics among countries with environmental interaction; to environmental justice and human rights and theories of historical injustices and restitution; to other fi elds such as political ecology, which Martínez-Alier defi nes as the study of distributive ecological confl icts; or to the ‘eco- colonialism’ of Agarwal and Narain (Paredis et al. 2004: 74).
The ‘ecological footprint’ measures the quantity of land (and water) needed to sustain a specifi c mode of production and consumption, and this is compared with the carrying capacity of a specifi c territory and with the average carrying capacity of the planet, to provide a measure of the ecological defi cit between the ideal and the real: the ecological debt. A large and sparsely populated country like Canada, for example, had a carrying capacity of 14.24 ha/per capita in 2002, and although its ecological footprint was only 8.84 ha/person, the latter fi gure was far above the sustainable global average (1.8 ha/
person); even so, from this perspective, Canada can be considered an ecological creditor.
The opposite occurs in a relatively small and overpopulated country like Bangladesh:
although it has a footprint of only 0.53 ha/person and is a long way from the sustainable global average, its carrying capacity was only 0.30 ha/person (see Table 10.1).
We thus fi nd an ecological debt of −5.40 ha/person in the Canadian case, and 0.23 in the Bangladeshi case, fi gures that express very diff erent and contradictory socio- ecological realities. The ecological debt, as Joan Martínez-Alier would put it, refers to the ‘carrying capacity expropriated’ by some countries and societies at the expense of others.
In the case of environmental space, instead of combining all the parameters (agricul-tural land, pasture, forest, sea, built- up area and CO2 absorption capacity) into a single factor, the area of land needed to sustain a given population, fi ve factors – energy, renewable raw materials, agricultural land, wood and water – are calculated for each country and compared with the global averages for each.
This type of indicator, together with calculation methodologies like the analysis of material fl ows (Naredo and Valero, 1999) or the DPSIR model (driving force–pressure–
state–impact–response) utilized by the European Environment Agency or Eurostat, lays the foundations for a multidisciplinary approach to obtaining a complex calculation.
In any case, the need for measurement can lead us to both a physical calculation and Table 10.1 A comparison of ecological debt: Canada and Bangladesh
Country Ecological
footprint (ha/person)
Carrying capacity (ha/person)
National defi cit (ha/person)
Sustainable defi cit (ha/person)
Canada 8.84 14.24 −5.40 7.04
Bangladesh 0.53 0.30 0.23 −1.27
Source: Russi et al. (2006).
the translation of such physical magnitudes into a monetary debt. Conscious that mon-etary quantifi cation is biased and that it is not a central concern of the social movements working for recognition of the ecological debt, the use of economic fi gures can on occa-sion serve, in a globally monetarized world, as a graphic form for representing environ-mental damage and, above all, as an evaluative element that counteracts the frequently paid foreign debt. As Joan Martínez-Alier explains for the Latin American case, if the region’s total foreign debt were $700 000 million dollars in 1991, that would be the equiva-lent to the costs of reducing the carbon debt of the industrialized countries in a mere 12 years, at a rate of $60 000 million dollars annually (Martínez-Alier, 2004: 293). Or for the case of Ecuador, if we consider an element such as unequal exchange, both ecological and economic, the ecological debt generated in favour of the country annually (approxi-mately $6500 million) is equivalent to a third of its total foreign debt (Villalba, 2008).
How to quantify the ecological debt
Giving a monetary value to the ecological debt as a whole is a complex question (Barcena et al., 2009). In the fi rst place, there are diffi culties due to the great quantity of environ-mental damage done from the colonial period up to the present, making it impossible to quantify and evaluate all of this. A fi rst attempt at clarifi cation would be to distinguish between the mechanisms generating that debt (pillage of resources, loss of sovereignty in food, unequal exchange in trade, unequal use of the global environmental space etc.) and its components (carbon debt, biopiracy, export of wastes, environmental liabilities and externalities etc.).
In the second place, the complexity of relations between ecosystems and human society makes it diffi cult to determine exactly the consequences of environmental damage. The interactions between the elements of the natural and the social systems can greatly amplify a disturbance in the initial balance and lead to irreversible and unfore-seeable changes. Pollution is transmitted and accumulated throughout the food chain, and the risk is increased by many factors that at times interact and often have long- term eff ects. It is therefore very diffi cult to isolate the eff ect of each polluting element and to establish a linear relationship of cause and eff ect.
In the third place, monetary evaluation can refl ect only a part of the losses associated with the ecological debt, while ignoring many other aspects of the losses. For instance, economists employ several methods to estimate the economic value of a human life, using for example the opportunity cost of work lost or the cost of life insurance policies.
These evaluations refl ect only a part of the losses associated with a death, while many other aspects cannot be expressed in monetary language at all. Besides, these estimations are questionable as they depend on income (the death of a professional is more expensive than that of a labourer).
For all these reasons, it is not possible to compensate for more than a minimal part of the ecological debt. In many cases, communities adversely aff ected by a company refuse to discuss the sum of money they should be off ered. However, in the business and institu-tional fi eld it can be more eff ective to talk in a quantitative and monetary language. For example, contrasting parts of the ecological debt, expressed in monetary values, with the foreign debt can be useful for demonstrating that the latter has been amply ‘paid’, and that it is the North that is indebted to the South and not vice versa. Besides, the monetary evaluation of environmental damage is useful in a judicial context: monetary
compensa-tion for damage may be the only way for the victims to receive at least something and for the guilty party to be punished, as well as providing a deterrent eff ect that prompts companies to take precautions to reduce the risk of accidents.
In any case, a debt is an acquired responsibility, an obligation towards others, which in our case proceeds from excess or overutilization of something belonging to others, or held in common with them. This takes us from the economy to the fi elds of philosophy and law, to the defi nitions of environmental justice, equitable rights and national sover-eignty over resources, and also to the natural sciences for determining the sustainable use of resources and the carrying capacity of ecosystems.
Monetary compensation is therefore not the only way of evaluating the ecological debt: methods of physical quantifi cation should and must be preferentially employed.
Some of the indicators that can be used are those obtained from the Analysis of Material Flows (e.g. Eurostat, 2001), a methodology that consists in calculating the weight of all the materials that enter and leave an economic system. The fl ow of materials is not a direct indicator of pollution (a gram of mercury pollutes more than a ton of iron), but it can give an idea of the physical dimensions of an economy. Using this methodology, we can observe that while from the monetary point of view European imports are roughly equal to exports, in terms of weight Europe imports approximately four times more than it exports (Giljum and Hubacek, 2001, cited in Giljum, 2004). In Latin America, by contrast, as much as six tons is exported for each ton imported (Vallejo, 2006a, 2006b);
hence it is abundantly clear that Latin America is situated among the ecological creditors and the EU is among the debtors.
This means that European exports are much more expensive than its imports: the income obtained from the sale of a ton of exported goods can be used to buy four tons of imported goods. That is why the countries of the South, due to poverty and the foreign debt, fi nd themselves motivated to sell a growing volume of primary goods, such as fossil fuels, metals, minerals etc., which produce a great deal of pollution and little wealth at the site of extraction and processing, while the countries of the North specialize in fi nal products, which are more expensive and less polluting.
Turning now to the fi eld of responsibilities, the ecological debt obliges us to talk of creditor and debtor agents. The latter can be public and/or private, state administrations and/or companies, as well as certain consumer classes in both the wealthy and impov-erished countries. Who are the creditors of the debt? In the ranks of those who should receive compensation, we fi nd states and social collectives – indigenous, farmers’ and women’s groups – as well as the future generations who will be deprived of resources or aff ected by ecological problems inherited from an inappropriate and selfi sh management of natural ecosystems by past generations. Such is the case of the debt acquired through the abusive use of the atmosphere for the dumping of greenhouse gases, which have led to climate change.
Content of the ecological debt
We now set out to explain some of the possible contents of the so- called ecological debt, concentrating, without any pretension to be exhaustive, on those elements that seem most relevant and on which most work has been done. At the same time, it must be recognized that there are other areas, such as the debt contracted through the loss of sovereignty in food, towards which attention should be directed.1
Here, following in the steps of Acción Ecológica (Ecuador) and of Joan Martínez-Alier, we propose four elements, or domains, where the ecological debt can be evaluated.
These are: carbon debt, biopiracy, waste export and environmental liabilities.
Carbon debt
Scientists, especially after the presentation in Paris (December 2006) of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are now agreed that the build- up of gases caused by the use of fossil fuels is causing an increase in global mean temperatures. This has potentially disastrous consequences, such as a rise in sea level, the melting of the glaciers, increase in desert areas, reduction of agricultural yield, loss of plant and animal species and an increase in extreme meteorological events (see Parks and Roberts, Chapter 19, and Murphy, Chapter 18, in Part II of this volume).
Recently, the report prepared by Lord Stern,2 Economic Adviser to the UK Government and former chief economist of the World Bank, has had a strong social and political impact through its affi rmation that the annual economic cost of climate change could be between 5 and 20 per cent of global GDP, and by comparing it to the economic costs of the two world wars and the subsequent reconstruction eff orts.
These harmful eff ects will befall all inhabitants of the planet. But it is the countries of the South that will be most aff ected by anthropogenic climate change (Simms, 2005).
This is for three reasons: fi rst, because the areas most subjected to hurricanes, fl ood-ing and desertifi cation are located in the countries of the South; second, because the impoverished countries have less resources available for defending themselves against these phenomena; and, third, because their economies are based to a larger extent on the primary sector, which will be the most damaged.
On the other hand, the causes of the greenhouse eff ect are to be found principally in the great consumption of fossil fuels by the rich countries (see Parks and Roberts, Chapter 19 in Part II of this volume). As a result, the countries of the North, whose eco-nomic development and welfare are based on a highly intensive use of the energy sources responsible for the emission of greenhouse gases, are debtors towards the countries of the South. That part of the ecological debt is called the carbon debt (Dillon, 2000).
Calculation of the portion of the ecological debt corresponding to the carbon debt involves approximations and ambiguities for three reasons. First, there is no agreement among scientists on the quantity of anthropogenic greenhouse gases that might be con-sidered acceptable, due to the complexity of atmospheric phenomena. It is not known by how much the temperature of the earth will rise as a result of the increase in the concen-tration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Second, the increase in the temperature of the earth will have unforeseeable consequences because the network of interrelations and feedbacks among the diff erent components of the ecosystems could amplify the eff ects.
Finally, a fi ctitious price must be used in estimating the monetary value of the carbon debt, and this fi gure will always be open to criticism, as there are diff erent methods for its calculation, each of which produces a diff erent result (Encina and Barcena, 2006).
The IPCC calculates that, in the future, an increase of 2.5 °C in the temperature would mean a cost of between 1.5 per cent and 2 per cent of world GDP, as stated in the Third Evaluation Report (2001).3 The German Institute for Economic Research (DIW)4 has concluded that an increase in world temperature of only 1 °C would give rise to losses of over €1.5 trillion per year in the world economy from 2050 onwards, which would mean
between €5 and €181 per tonne of CO2 emitted, with an average value of €58 per tonne (tCO2).
The European Commission, which seeks to play the role of leader in global climate change policies, has made a proposal to place a value on each tonne of CO2 , with the aim of penalizing at that cost those emitters who exceed the assigned quotas in the Internal Market of CO2 emissions – a cost that will be €100 per tCO2.5
According to the IPCC, in order to maintain stable levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, emissions should be reduced to 3.33 Gigatonnes6 of carbon (GtC) per year. If we take 6 GtC, the baseline emissions level used in the Kyoto Protocol (1990), and calculate the excess emissions in that year, we can see that in 1990 the excess was 2.65 GtC, which is equivalent to 9.805 GtCO2.7
If carbon debt is simply calculated as the product of excess CO2 emissions and the price per tonne of CO2 (tCO2) in Euros, then using the DIW average fi gure of €58/tCO2, the global carbon debt in 1990 would have been €568.7 billion, while using the European Commission price of €100/tCO2 it would have been only just short of one trillion euros:
€980.5 billion.
This monetary measure enables us to compare the environmental footprint infl icted on the planet, the eff ects of which are felt disproportionately by the countries of the South, with the economic impact and profi ts that are generated in the North; the picture thus revealed is totally asymmetric. For example, the ecological debt fi gure calculated using the EU CO2 price is €980 billion for 1990 alone, which compares with a total accumu-lated external debt for Latin America of around €700 billion in 1991 (Martínez-Alier, 2004). Thus, in just one year, the ecological debt incurred by the world’s wealthiest countries was suffi cient to repay the total accumulated external debt of Latin America, leaving a further €280 billion of ecological debt.
Alternatively, we might calculate the carbon debt generated by a transnational company like the Spanish petroleum conglomerate Repsol. In 2001 alone, Repsol acquired a carbon debt of €650 million, with its total debt today standing at approximately €2 billion.8
Finally, it can be seen that the logic underlying the concept of the ecological debt is dif-ferent from that which inspires the Kyoto Protocol. In fact, the Kyoto Protocol assigns quotas for the reduction of emissions on the basis of 1990 emissions: whoever polluted the most in 1990 will have more right to pollute in the future. As Lohmann (2001) has observed, ‘the Kyoto Protocol creates more monetary goods than any other treaty in history’. In contrast, the idea of ecological debt implies that all the inhabitants of the planet should have the right to the same quantity of emissions, irrespective of where they were born; hence whoever pollutes more than their corresponding quota is a debtor towards humanity.
Biopiracy
There is another part of the ecological debt that derives from the intellectual appro-priation and commercial utilization of ancestral knowledge relating to seeds, the use of medicinal plants and other knowledge of the peasantry and indigenous peoples, knowl-edge on which biotechnology and modern industrial agriculture are based. This is known as biopiracy.
The characteristics of plant and animal species are the product of their continuing
interaction over time with their physical surroundings, with each other and with human beings. For thousands of years indigenous and peasant communities have selected species for use as food, fi bre and medicinal products, and through that interaction they have changed the characteristics of the natural species, creating diff erent varieties with properties that are known to only a few. This knowledge is of great value to pharmaceu-tical, biotechnological and agricultural companies, which use it to obtain income. And in the majority of cases they do not pay, or pay very little, to the local populations that are the authentic owners of that knowledge.
As Vandana Shiva says, biodiversity has always been a local communitarian resource:
A resource is common property when there is a social system that assures its utilisation adapted
A resource is common property when there is a social system that assures its utilisation adapted