CETRI
An analysis by Bernard Duterme (CETRI) published by Equal Times.
“We are responsible for climate change, which imposes mortality costs on poor countries. I estimate these costs at US$500 billion a year,” says Esther Duflo, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, speaking on 18 March 2024 at the University of Liège, where she was awarded the insignia of Doctor Honoris Causa. In putting forward this figure, is the French-American economist referring to the Loss and Damage Fund ratified by COP28 in Dubai last year ? Or is she referring more generally to the ‘climate debt,’ or the broader concept of ‘ecological debt,’ that rich countries owe to poor countries ?
As far back as the 1980s, the idea of ecological debt began to gradually take hold in both activist circles as well as scientific approaches to the over-exploitation of natural resources (water, soil, forests, etc.), environmental degradation and various forms of pollution. In its more ethereal versions, this debt is said to be owed to ecosystems, to living organisms or to the planet itself. In its more political versions, it is regarded as a debt owed to the countries of the Global South, to impoverished populations and to future generations.
Put another way, the production methods and levels of consumption practiced by a minority of the world’s population from the beginnings of industrial development to the present day, which are neither ‘sustainable’ (given the non-renewable nature of the resources ‘consumed’) nor ‘generalisable’ (given their destructive environmental impact), make this minority ‘indebted’ to the majorities who have not had and will not have access to these same privileges.
The situation of these majorities is further aggravated by the fact that they are in effect the first to bear the brunt, in their daily lives, of the disastrous effects of the ecological and climate crises caused by the productivist and consumerist excesses of the wealthiest populations.
This debt can thus be seen as having two moral grounds :
The first is the inequality of access to ‘scarce’ resources, long considered inexhaustible before awareness of their finiteness spread. These resources have long been extracted in part from the countries of the Global South to fuel economic growth and material well-being in the countries of the Global North. The monopolisation of natural resources by some prevents others from enjoying them.
The second is the far greater damage that large-scale producers and consumers cause compared with small-scale producers and consumers, while, conversely, the adverse effects of this damage are far greater on small-scale than on large-scale consumers. The French writer Victor Hugo once wrote : “The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.” Almost every week, a new report, official or unofficial, documents, illustrates and quantifies this paradox.
The idea of ecological debt that rich countries are being asked to repay to poor countries is a response to the unfairness of this paradox. Paying such a debt would be a way of rendering ‘environmental justice’, to use another phrase that is gaining in popularity. It would mean making efforts to compensate for inequalities in development, helping the most vulnerable to adapt to ecological and climatic disruption, and even repairing the damage that has already been done. However, to say that the international community and the rich countries have made this a priority commensurate with its legitimacy and urgency would be a lie.
Let the guilty parties foot the bill !
The adoption of the Principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro gave at least implicit recognition to the concept of a debt owed by the ‘more responsible’ to the ‘less responsible’.
While this proposal had been discussed previously (at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in the 1960s, at the 1972 Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, during the initiative for a New International Economic Order in 1974, etc.), it wasn’t until the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio that it finally became part of new international environmental law, thanks to sustained advocacy by the ‘developing countries’.
The proposal was significant, even revolutionary. According to Principle 7 of the Report of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development : “States shall cooperate in a spirit of global partnership to conserve, protect and restore the health and integrity of the Earth’s ecosystem. In view of the different contributions to global environmental degradation, States have common but differentiated responsibilities. The developed countries acknowledge the responsibility that they bear in the international pursuit of sustainable development in view of the pressures their societies place on the global environment and of the technologies and financial resources they command”.
In a nutshell, the CBDR recognises both the problem (the ecological crisis) and its (anthropogenic) causes, and, above all, names the culprits (the developed countries) responsible for making good their mistakes.
This is no mean feat given the widespread relativisation of the problem (‘stop catastrophism’), denial of its human origins (‘we’re being lied to’) and the dilution of responsibility (‘we’re all in the same boat’). More than three decades ago, however, the international community added to the idea of shared responsibility for the degradation of the global environment the idea that one part of humanity bears more responsibility and is thus accountable to the rest of humanity for its high level of development and devastating consumerism. This idea continues to prove a powerful counterweight to populist and denialist rhetoric.
To put it another way, the ecological debt that rich countries owe to poor countries, which has accumulated since the early days of the industrial revolution, must urgently be enforced – so urgently that it should have been enforced decades ago. To say that action has been slow in coming would be putting it mildly. But while over the course of several summits and conferences the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’, with its multiple legal interpretations, has gone through various stages of precision, variation, inflection and concretisation, one thing has remained constant : the largely inadequate application of the measures that emanate from it.
Special ‘green funds’ have been set up here and there but systematically fall far short, both in terms of their quantified objectives and even more so in terms of the payments they actually make, compared to what they should be in the eyes of the scientists who have the audacity to quantify them.
According to analysts at the International Monetary Fund, the ‘climate debt’ of the ‘advanced countries,’ based on their actual and projected CO₂ emissions for the period 1959-2035, would amount to more than US$100 trillion, while “current climate finance has not yet reached the goal of US$100 billion a year”.
To a greater or lesser extent, governments are baulking at their commitments or relaxing their efforts in favour of other priorities. Some are backing out entirely, like Trump’s United States, which reneged on the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017 and could do so again if the far-right leader wins a second term. Emerging countries like China, India and Brazil, on the other hand, believe that they should share in the ‘burden’ to the extent of their current responsibility for environmental damage, thereby dissociating themselves from both the ‘least developed countries,’ whose impact on the climate remains negligible, and the old industrialised countries, which are still responsible, in relative terms, for most of the pollution.
While there are grounds for doubting the claims of the emerging powers, the petro-monarchies of the Gulf occupy an even worse position, having eclipsed the Western countries in terms of per capita CO₂ emissions.
Ecological debt is increasing rather than decreasing
In addition to the slowness, or rather the reluctance of rich countries to honour their ecological debt, many critical voices in the Global South observe that a significant proportion of the ‘green’ policies that public and private actors from the Global North pursue in poor countries tend to exacerbate the North-South divide. Clearly, as we can see, the ecological debt is far from being repaid.
These critical voices single out the ‘false solutions’ of ‘green capitalism’ and ‘green growth,’ which are based on a “colonisation of ecology by the liberal economic order’s logic of accumulation”.
These include conservation policies (such as ‘protected areas,’ which are closed to local populations but open to ecotourists), policies of compensation, extraction (such as fake forest plantations in exchange for ‘rights to pollute,’ monocultures, ‘green deserts’ for export, etc.), or policies of dispossession, privatisation, financialisation of ‘living things’ and valorisation of ‘natural capital’ (attributing a price for conservation to various ecosystem functions in order to profit from them), which are socially and environmentally harmful and add to the ecological debt.
Making such calculations is also becoming increasingly difficult and inevitably leads to controversy. This in turn leads to a certain status quo, postponed decisions, evasion and withdrawal.
As proof of this, none of the various funds set up by the so-called international community to help poor countries ‘mitigate’ desertification, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, climate disruption, etc., can match, on paper much less in reality, the sums estimated as necessary by expert bodies.
“At each new climate conference, we promise to allocate a budget of US$100 billion to poor countries. One hundred billion is not enough for the damage we are inflicting on them. What’s more, it’s not being paid out,” said economist Duflo in Belgium recently.
“The value of the human lives we are destroying by releasing carbon into the atmosphere,” she calculates, without even taking into account past CO₂ emissions, “makes Europe and the United States responsible for US$500 billion in losses in poor countries every year”.
To conclude : “This is not a question of solidarity : we owe this money”. This ecological and moral debt as urgent as it is colossal.
This article has been translated from French by Equal Times.
