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CARBON EMISSIONS - ECOLOGICAL DEBT - KYOTO PROTOCOL - ANDREW SIMMS - ENVIRONMENTAL REFUGEES - GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE -

Carbon emissions: debtors and creditors*

World Guide
The Tuvalu authorities have already established an evacuation plan with New Zealand and Australia. However, it is not just small islands that will suffer the effects of rising waters; in Bangladesh, some 20 million people could become environmental refugees


Decades of dubious global
financial management by the multilateral banking institutions have made Africa and Latin America into debtors to the developed world. However, this familiar scenario of international relations (in which the creditor is invariably in the North) could change radically. The impacts of global climate change could invert the situation, with the creditors of the North becoming ecological debtors to the countries of the South.

In the Pacific Ocean, the archipelago of Tuvalu -a member of the
United Nations since 2000- may soon be considered the largest ecological creditor in the world. The rising sea levels caused by global warming threaten to erase this set of islands located between 6° and 11º latitude south. The Tuvalu authorities have already established an evacuation plan with New Zealand and Australia. However, it is not just small islands that will suffer the effects of rising waters; in Bangladesh, some 20 million people could become environmental refugees.

The Canadian International Development Agency has proposed to cancel US$680,000 of Honduras' total $11 million
debt to Canada if the Central American country sets up an office to promote reforestation and oversee forest conservation -a deal encouraged under the Kyoto Protocol. In exchange, Canada would obtain credits for ‘reducing’ its emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases without having to alter any of its industrial practices at home.

Staking their bets on the Carbon Emissions Market, the wealthy countries are aiming to evade their historic
debt incurred by their abusive use of shared natural resources. It is not an exclusively economic debt, given that the disappearance of a country, in other words, a culture, cannot be compensated by any sum of money. Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation has stated that ‘Third World debt pales into insignificance in the face of the ecological debts of industrialized countries.

The ecological debt -incurred by the rich who have taken a larger share of the environmental wealth than a logical distribution would have granted them -gives the countries of the South a moral advantage in international negotiations. As Simms says, arealistic global
solution to the ecological debt should include recognizing the right of all to share the common natural goods and the economic benefits they bring, as well as a plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.


*Published in The World Guide

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