Roger Highfield, The Telegraph 21 Jan 08;
A study has revealed the extent to which poorer countries are trampled by the huge environmental footprints of the rich.
The environmental damage caused by rich nations disproportionately impacts poor nations and costs them almost £920 billion, on par with or exceeding their combined foreign debt, according to a first-ever global accounting of the dollar costs of countries' ecological footprints.
Meanwhile, the effect of poor on rich nations, such as Britain, is less than a third of the impact that the rich have on the poor.
Because the global environment does not respect political borders, the impact of ecological damage wrought by one country can be felt across the world. To illustrate that point, an American team has attempted to determine which nations are driving ecological damage and which are paying the price.
The study, led by former University of California, Berkeley, research fellow Thara Srinivasan, assessed the impacts of agricultural intensification and expansion, deforestation, overfishing, loss of mangrove swamps and forests, ozone depletion and climate change from 1961 to 2000.
In the case of climate change and ozone depletion, the researchers also estimated the impacts that may be felt through the end of this century.
"Low-income countries will bear significant burdens from climate change and ozone depletion. But these environmental problems have been overwhelmingly driven by emission of greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting chemicals by the rest of the world," Srinivasan says.
Climate change is expected to increase the severity of storms and extreme weather, including prolonged droughts and flooding, with an increase in infectious diseases. Ozone depletion mostly impacts health, with increases expected in cancer rates, cataracts and blindness. All of these will affect vulnerable low-income countries disproportionately.
In addition to climate change and ozone depletion, overfishing and conversion of mangrove swamps to shrimp farming are areas in which rich nations burden poor countries.
When all these impacts are added up, the portion of the footprint of high-income nations that is falling on the low-income countries is comparable to or greater than the financial debt recognised for low income countries, which has a net present value of 1.8 trillion in 2005 international dollars (International dollars are US dollars adjusted to account for the different purchasing power of different currencies.) "The ecological debt could more than offset the financial debt of low-income nations," she says.
"We think the measured impact is conservative. And given that it's conservative, the numbers are very striking," adds Srinivasan. "To our knowledge, our study is the first to really examine where nations' ecological footprints are falling, and it is an interesting contrast to the wealth of nations."
"To some extent, the rich nations have developed at the expense of the poor and, in effect, there is a debt to the poor," says coauthor Prof Richard Norgaard, also of UC Berkeley, coauthor of the paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "You don't see it until you do the kind of accounting that we do here."
The calculation of the ecological footprints of the world's low-, middle- and high-income nations drew upon more than a decade of assessments by environmental economists who have tried to attach monetary figures to environmental damage, plus data from the recent United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and World Bank reports.
Norgaard admits that "there will be a lot of controversy about whether you can even do this kind of study and whether we did it right. A lot of that will just be trying to blindside the study, to not think about it. What we really want to do is challenge people to think about it. And if anything, if you don't believe it, do it yourself and do it better."
