Cal Study: Rich Countries Do $1.8 Trillion Damage To Poor Countries

[CptSternn]

http://www.nbc11.com/news/15113049/detail.html

UC Berkeley researchers report that environmental damage caused by rich nations affects poor nations so much, it costs them more than their combined foreign debt.

The study examined the impacts of the expansion of agriculture, deforestation, overfishing, loss of swamps and ozone completion from 1961 to 2000.

When all these impacts are added up, the portion of the footprint of high-income nations falling on low-income countries is greater than their entire financial debt, or about $1.8 trillion, according to lead researcher Thara Srinivasan.

"At least to some extent, the rich nations have developed at the expense of the poor and, in effect, there is a debt to the poor," said coauthor Richard B. Norgaard, an ecological economist and UC Berkeley professor of energy and resources. "That, perhaps, is one reason that they are poor. You don't see it until you do the kind of accounting that we do here."

The study is the first-ever global accounting of the dollar costs of countries' ecological footprints.

Researchers also took into account data from World Bank reports in what they said was an effort to attach a monetary value to massive environmental damage everywhere on the planet.

Cal researchers said because of the size of the undertaking they couldn't include areas that are difficult to assess, such as loss of habitat and biodiversity as well as the effects of industrial pollution.

Because of this, researchers said that the $1.8 trillion figure was a minimum.

"We think the measured impact is conservative. And given that it's conservative, the numbers are very striking," said Srinivasan, who is now at the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab in Berkeley. "To our knowledge, our study is the first to really examine where nations' ecological footprints are falling, and it is an interesting contrast to the wealth of nations."

Srinivasan and her colleagues reported their results this week in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"In the past half century, humanity has transformed our natural environment at an unprecedented speed and scale," Srinivasan said, "What we don't know is which nations around the world are really driving the ecological damages and which are paying the price."

"Low-income countries will bear significant burdens from climate change and ozone depletion," Srinivasan said. "But these environmental problems have been overwhelmingly driven by emission of greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting chemicals by the rest of the world."

Climate change is expected to increase the severity of storms and extreme weather, including prolonged droughts and flooding, with an increase in infectious diseases.

Ozone depletion mostly affects health, with increases expected in cancer rates, cataracts and blindness. All of these will affect vulnerable low-income countries disproportionately, researchers said.

[Don't Look Behind You]

Some countries should really get off their asses and DO something to clean up their own shit instead of sending a few bucks to developing countries and acting as if they are doing a favour. .. ..