Our Common Responsibility to the Global Environment: The Europeans’ Ecological Debt

Yolanda ZIAKA, 10 novembre 2005

Everyone knows more or less what the debt Third World countries is: a financial debt. This is not true for the ecological debt, a new concept that was coined by South American NGOs in the early 1990s.

In its current conception, as used by South American activists, the ecological debt is a debt that is due by the industrialized countries of the North to the Third World countries, once colonies, as per the environmental impact entailed (still today) by the exploitation of their resources by the countries of the North, and as per « imported’ environmental impacts (waste dumped on their soil, etc.). The organization Acción Ecológica defines ecological debt as the responsibility of the industrialized countries for the « damage caused over time » of the planet by their « production and consumption patterns. »

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