World's Poor Feel More Environmental Pain

While global trade is fueling rapid economic development in once-poor nations like China and India, the world's richest economies are exacting a heavy ecological toll on low-income countries.

In fact, the cost of the environmental damage being wrought by high-income nations would more than offset the combined foreign debt of all the world's poor countries, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley (UC/Berkeley). Among the types of environmental damage that disproportionately hurts the poor: climate change, ozone depletion, deforestation, overfishing, loss of mangrove swamps and forests, and expanding or intensified agriculture.

Late last year, United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon warned that climate change alone threatened global efforts to wipe out poverty. The interplay between economy and environment is also expected to come up as a topic of discussion during this week's annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Up until now, though, no one had developed a full accounting of how the world's different income groups -- low, middle and high -- affect each other ecologically, and what those affects amount to in dollar figures.

That changed with a study published this week in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by co-authors Thara Srinivasan, a former research fellow at UC/Berkeley, and Richard B. Norgaard, an ecological economist and professor at UC/Berkeley. They calculated that the environmental footprint of the world's high-income countries costs the world's low-income nations $2.5 trillion (in 2005 international dollars). For comparison's sake, the international financial debt borne by low-income countries totals $1.8 trillion (in 2005 international dollars).

"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," said Srinivasan, now a researcher at the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology (PEaCE) Lab in Berkeley.

"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," Norgaard added. "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."

Both Srinivasan and Norgaard say their calculations are probably lower than the real-life costs, because they left out environmental impacts like habitat loss, biodiversity loss and the effects of industrial pollution. While such factors can have a real economic impact, it's difficult to attach dollar figures to them.

For the factors they did study, the impacts go beyond dollars; they affect human lives as well. To meet the demand for farmed shrimp in wealthier countries, for example, poor nations often cut down mangrove forests that provide natural protection from storms. Some blame such deforestation for the devastating number of people killed in the December 2005 tsunami in Southeast Asia.

Srinivasan and Norgaard also found that middle-income nations have an ecological footprint on low-income countries that's almost the same size as high-income nations. While the world's poor also impact other groups ecologically, their footprint is far smaller than either of the other two income groups.

"There will be a lot of controversy about whether you can even do this kind of study and whether we did it right," Norgaard said. "A lot of that will just be trying to blindside the study, to not think about it. What we really want to do is challenge people to think about it. And if anything, if you don't believe it, do it yourself and do it better."