[SustainableTompkins] Graphic depicts Global ecofootprint injustice

[Stephen Nicholson]

This is from Science News, and shows by dollar cost that the rich nations
are stomping on the poor ones.
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20080126/

 Big Foot: Eco-footprints of rich dwarf poor nations' debt

*Susan Milius*

The first accounting of who's stomping on whom finds rich nations leaving
supersized boot prints of ecological damage on poor countries, adding up to
more than those nations' debt to the wealthier countries.

  [image: a9246_1971.jpg]

GIANT STEPS. Color-coded footprints indicate the dollar cost, in trillions,
of environmental damage inflicted by high-, middle-, and low-income groups
of nations on each of the other two groups.
E. Roell, from Srinivasan graphic

Rich nations' doings during the last 4 decades of the 20th century caused up
to $2.5 trillion in environmental impacts on poor countries, Thara
Srinivasan of the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Laboratory in
Berkeley, Calif., and her colleagues estimate. Middle-income nations did
about the same amount of damage to the low-income countries.

Each wallop is bigger than the total that poor countries have borrowed from
wealthier nations. In 2000, that borrowing added up to $1.8 trillion. (All
amounts are in 2005 international dollars, which are adjusted for purchasing
power around the world.)

"This makes me wonder who owes who here," says Jonathan Foley, who directs
the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at the University
of Wisconsin–Madison.

Environmental economists have experimented with ways to measure footprints
of various activities since the 1990s, but Srinivasan says she doesn't know
of another attempt at a broad global accounting.

The team used the World Bank's groupings of countries. Poor nations, with
annual per capita income of $875 or less, included Bangladesh, India, and
Nigeria, among others. Brazil, China, and the Russian Federation fall into
the middling group. Income of $10,726 or more put such countries as Japan,
the United States, and European nations into the rich group.

The researchers scoured the environmental literature for data on impacts.
Workable information, from such sources as the United Nations and the United
Kingdom's Stern Review, turned up for six topics: climate change, ozone
depletion, expanding agriculture, deforestation, overfishing, and the loss
of mangrove swamps. Ecological damage included such miseries as the costs of
health problems due to thinning ozone and storm damage along coasts no
longer buffered by mangrove swamps. For ozone depletion and climate change,
the researchers included impacts still to come (until 2100) of the
activities in their 40-year study period.

Srinivasan laments the gaps in information that kept the analysis from
toting up the ecological toll of other problems, such as pollution, invasive
species, waterway modification, and war.

The team also looked at studies on which nations were driving particular
environmental changes. For climate change, for example, the analysts
calculated the proportion of greenhouse gases emitted by each of the nation
groups. Seafood consumption measured the responsibility for overfishing.

The well-off disproportionately affected the poor for climate change, ozone
depletion, and, less predictably, overfishing. "We were surprised," says
Srinivasan. The results appear this week online in the *Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences* <http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0709562104>.

"The injustice inherent in the current environmental crisis may well
exacerbate the divide between rich and poor," says Boris Worm, a marine
biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.


-- 
Stephen C. Nicholson
220 Yaple Rd.
Berkshire, NY 13736
607-539-6923
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