Ecological debt

World map coloured according to the number of days each country takes to exhaust the resources it produces in the same year (green-high to red-low).
The Global North consumption is higher than its production (shown by the red color), while the Global South produces more than consumes (green color). The resource proportion between consumption and production relates to the amount of environmental degradation.

Ecological debt refers to the accumulated debt seen by some campaigners as owed by the Global North to Global South countries, due to the net sum of historical environmental injustice, especially through resource exploitation, habitat degradation, and pollution by waste discharge.[1][2] The concept was coined by Global Southerner non-governmental organizations in the 1990s and its definition has varied over the years, in several attempts of greater specification.[3]

Within the ecological debt broad definition, there are two main aspects: the ecological damage caused over time by a country in one or other countries or to ecosystems beyond national jurisdiction through its production and consumption patterns; and the exploitation or use of ecosystems over time by a country at the expense of the equitable rights to these ecosystems by other countries.[4]

  1. ^ Warlenius, Rikard; Pierce, Gregory; Ramasar, Vasna (1 January 2015). "Reversing the arrow of arrears: The concept of "ecological debt" and its value for environmental justice". Global Environmental Change. 30: 21–30. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.10.014. ISSN 0959-3780.
  2. ^ Donoso, A. (2015). "We are not debtors, we are creditors. In: Bravo, E., & Yánez, I. (Eds.), No more looting and destruction! We the peoples of the south are ecological creditors". Southern Peoples Ecological Debt Creditors Alliance (SPEDCA).
  3. ^ Paredis, Erik (2009). The Concept of Ecological Debt: Its Meaning and Applicability in International Policy. Academia Press. ISBN 978-90-382-1341-5.
  4. ^ "Ecological debt". Retrieved 7 October 2020.