‘ecological debts’ of G8 countries bigger problem than poor country debt says new book

publication date: 16 May 2005

“Essential reading,”

R K Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

With climate change and Africa set to head the agenda for this summer’s G8 summit in Britain, a new book, Ecological Debt – the Health of the Planet and the Wealth of Nations, by Andrew Simms, nef's policy director and one of the original Jubilee 2000 debt relief campaigners, published by Pluto Books, says that the ecological debts of rich countries are a bigger threat to global poverty eradication than the foreign debts of poor countries.

Andrew Simms argues that global warming shows how millions of us are running up long term, and life threatening huge ecological debts. Whilst these go unpaid, millions more living in poverty in the South suffer the burden of paying dubious foreign financial debts. The book introduces a great paradox of our age: how the global gap between rich and poor was built on ecological debts that the world’s poorest are now paying for. Optimistically, though, the book points to steps we can take to stop pushing the planet to the point of being environmentally bankrupt.

“Imagine opening a letter from the bank over breakfast to be told that, instead of your usual overdraft, you had an ecological debt that threatened the planet,” says Andrew Simms, “Chances are that if you live in a rich country like Britain or the United States you’re due such a letter, even if the bank to issue it doesn’t yet exist.”

Over the last two decades in the face of conventional financial debts, poor countries, lacking the systems of health, education and social support that the North enjoys, had to swallow the economic policy equivalent of horse pills. But by a growing consensus, this was economic medicine that was wrongly prescribed. Nobel prize winning economist James Tobin described the, ‘standard remedies,’ as ‘devastating to economic life.’

In Ecological Debt, Simms writes that the experience of the South in the face of a highly questionable financial debt problem, puts to shame the reluctance of rich Northern countries to adjust, or compromise their lifestyles in any way, in the light of very real ecological debts.

The book says the time is now write for a group of ‘ecological creditor’ countries from the developing world to draw up ‘adjustment’ plans for rich countries to follow, turning upside down decades of global economic policy designed in Washington, London and the other capitals of the G8.

Recommendations in the book for dealing with ecological debt include:

1. Legal recognition and protection under international law for environmental refugees displaced by climate change and environmental degredation.
2. Rich countries to pay the cost of the rest of the world having to adapt to global warming.
3. Trade sanctions to be used against non-Kyoto states such as the United States and Australia
4. Cancellation of the unpayable conventional debts of poor countries in the face of rich countries' ecological debts
5. Gas guzzling urban 4x4 cars to carry environmental health warnings like cigarette packets.
6. The end of government subsidies to fossil fuels
7. In the light of global warming, a G8 reassessment of the resources necessary to meet the international poverty reduction targets of the Millennium Development Goals
8. A global framework to follow the current Kyoto Protocol based on the principle of equal, per person greenhouse gas emissions entitlements and cutting emissions to a level to stop dangerous climate change (known as contraction and convergence)
9. Compulsory therapy for key decision makers to help them deal with their denial about the scale of action necessary to deal with climate change.
10. A new model of economic development in which the acid test will be whether any policy increases or decreases human vulnerability to climate change.

Ecological debt: the health of the planet and the wealth of nations

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	related
	Publications Ecological Debt: The Health of the Planet and the Wealth of Nations The Guardian: Drowning by numbers The New Statesman: Why we owe so much to victims of disaster BBC News Online: UK 'yet to support climate funds' The Guardian: UK fails to pay global warming dues

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