Mark Atkinson
Far from being in debt to rich countries, the world’s poorest nations are owed hundreds of billions of dollars by them for the disproportionate amount of environmental damage they inflict on the planet, says a report published recently by one of Britain’s leading charities.
Christian Aid says the developed world’s bill on its carbon dioxide account is three times as large as its financial debt from the developing world, or $612-billion compared to $200-billion.
The report says rich countries’ demands for debt repayments are morally illegitimate and undermine the ability of poor countries to achieve internationally agreed poverty reduction targets.
Andrew Simms, a policy adviser at Christian Aid, said: “We constantly think of the world’s poorest countries as being in debt to us, and force them to adopt draconian economic austerity measures as a result.
“But these debts are dwarfed by the huge and rising carbon debt owed by the rich countries to the global community, and for which, yet again, the poorest are paying.”
A quicker and more generous debt relief package was agreed in principle at the annual meeting of the Group of Seven leading industrialised nations in Germany earlier this year, but financial details are still being worked out.
British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, and Clare Short, the international development secretary, this week stepped up pressure on the European Commission to contribute one billion euros (645-million).
To calculate carbon debt, Simms has taken the world population in 1990 and divided it by the carbon dioxide emissions which scientists at that year’s intergovernmental panel on climate change said would be permitted to hit the target of a minimum 60% reduction in production of global warming gasses.
Simms reckons that gives everyone an allocation of 0,4 tonnes a year, with each tonne priced at $3 000 according to the contribution it is estimated to make to global gross domestic product.
On that basis, he says, heavily indebted poor countries are in credit on their climate account because of their under-use or efficient use of fossil fuels, while the developed world is deeply in the red.