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| Berta Cáceres, a prominent indigenous leader in the fight against the exploitation of the environment, is remembered here following her assassination. Source |
I’ve noticed a recurring theme emerging in my blogs. I suppose it started here, when I observed that not everyone would own the same amount of bicycles. This was an issue of inequitable resource distribution. But then, when I wrote about the degradation of water resources, I’d stumbled across something that they hadn’t taught me in any of my economics modules. That being: the inequitable distribution of externalities.
It seems to me that
generally, the global South bears the environmental brunt of consumptive
activities in economic superpowers. I wondered: is there any way these externalities
can be compensated? And what’s the incentive for doing so?
I was also interested in why
natural resources move from South to North; while this is beyond the scope of
this post, I do highly recommend
Sachs’s (2010)
paper on it.
Ecological Debt
To cite one of the most
famous names in the game, Joan Martinez-Alier, ecological debt can be defined
as:
1.
“the fact of
exporting products from poor regions and countries, at prices which do not take
into account the local externalities caused by these exports or the exhaustion
of natural resources” termed ecologically
unequal exchange (2002)
2.
the exploitation
of ecosystems and use of environmental space without compensation (e.g. use of
carbon sinks)
You will probably notice that words like ‘debt’ and ‘exchange’ imply that some monetary calculation has to be made. Indeed, many academics have devoted themselves to doing so.
Warlenius (2010) has made promising progress in quantifying climate debt. Ecological footprints, as I mentioned in my very first post with regard to ‘1.6 Earths’, have been popular too (see Palmer, 1999; Moran et al., 2007; Wackernagel et al., 2010 to name just a few). Personally, I was most impressed by the efforts of Srinivasan et al. (2008). They estimated the environmental cost of human activities from 1961 – 2000 (yes, it needs some updating) in six categories: climate change, overfishing, deforestation, agricultural expansion, ozone depletion, and mangrove conversion. The study found that climate change, overfishing and ozone depletion impacts predicted for low-income nations (the global South) was ‘overwhelmingly’ driven by consumption in middle and high-income countries. They even concluded that the ecological debt incurred by middle/high-income nations far exceeds the current external debt (around US$1.8 trillion) of low-income nations.
You may be thinking: how can
we put a price on nature – isn’t that what landed us in this mess in the first
place? I completely agree with you.
Martinez-Alier (2003) hits
back at such criticism with a witty reply: ‘Mea culpa. My excuse is that the
language of chrematistics is well understood in the North’. Dillon (2001, cited in Paredis, 2009)
completes this thought stating that quantifying ecological debt is useful
insofar that it can assist the campaigning effort, but should not be ‘reduced
to monetary compensation alone’. The ecological debt concept then, is perhaps
more indicative than it is literal. The political act of
recognizing the debt seems to be the crucial point here. If we recognize the
impact of our consumption on the environment, we can value the environment as
something more than a disposable service for our insatiable consumerist
appetite. And, we can start bringing social justice to the defenders of land, forests, rivers and wildlife, whose death toll stands at 185
this year.
What’s the incentive?
Equity, obviously. But it
seems that developed countries suspect
that equity implies they must sacrifice some of their material wealth. Thus
enter Steffen and Smith (2013)
with a theory on how it is in the ‘self-interest of the wealthy nations’ to
reduce the difference in per capita resource use (see my post)
between them and low-income nations.
Planetary Boundaries and
Social Justice
We’ve seen Steffen et al.’s
planetary boundaries before. A common criticism is that the planetary boundary
framework may hinder basic development, as was the view of African and
Caribbean delegates at the Global Sustainability Panel Sherpa meeting in Madrid
(2011).
Steffen and Smith (op. cit.) cite Carpenter and Bennetts (2011)
analysis of the phosphorous (P) boundary as an example of the positive
potential of redistributive action. Currently, phosphorous is unequally
distributed.
 |
| Source: Steffen and Smith (op. cit) adapted from Potter et al., (2009) |
Eutrophication of freshwater
systems, negative health effects and the risk of an anoxic event are higher in
regions with high-P fertilization. If we compare P fertilizer application with
countries experiencing chronic food insecurity (below), it is clear that a movement in
global fertilizer distribution towards the South can promote agriculture in places
where it is needed most.
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| Source: Steffen and Smith (op. cit) adapted from Ericksen et al., (2011) |
Lastly, climate change does
not discriminate*. Consider the increase in frequency of extreme weather events
this past summer in the US. Or, take it from an uncle and aunt of a fellow blogger that have been living in Florida since 1970
and have observed an increase in frequency and intensity of hurricanes in the
area. The latest bout of hurricanes cost the US an estimated $200 billion and caused significant social disruption (that’s an understatement really). A more equitable distribution
of resources and an improved understanding of the consequences of excessive
consumption will allow for a ‘safe and
just operating space for humanity’ (Raworth, 2012).
* I am not invalidating my observation that the burden of environmental
degradation is greater on less
developed nations.
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