Jan

22

2008
 
 

Destruction sans frontières



Rich countries cause most ecological damage, but poor ones pay for it

pollution in one country can hit others tooThere’s more than one kind of foreign debt. Climate change, ozone thinning, agriculture, aquaculture, deforestation and habitat conversion (how that euphemism grates!) all exert negative impacts at a global scale. The problem is that although we all pay the price only a small proportion of us get the benefit. And a group of scientists, led by Thara Srinivasan at the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Laboratory, Berkeley, California, find that those causing the damage often pay disproportionately less than those who suffer its consequences most directly. Their compilation of World Bank data and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios, published in PNAS this week, reveals many startling gems. For example, the loss of storm protection through the degradation of 35 percent of the world’s mangrove since 1980 is equivalent in monetary value to the planet’s entire aquaculture industry. Yet 96 percent of shrimp are exported to high-income (mangrove-less) countries. On the positive side, Srinivasan and colleagues hope that the framework they have developed will allow the relative level of ecological debts between nations to be more accurately assessed, a crucial first step towards paying them off. Source: Srinivasan UT, Carey SP, Hallstein E, Higgins PAT, Kerr AC, Koteen LE, Smith AB, Watson R, Harte J & Norgaard RB (2008) The debt of nations and the distribution of ecological impacts from human activities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0709562104

Image © Laurin Rinder

Filed Under Climate change, Habitat, Economics and conservation, Community-based conservation, Socio-political issues | 

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