History of an expression. In its general policy statement, 1Ahem In October, Prime Minister Michel Barnier spoke of a “double demand, that of reducing financial debt and ecological debt.” In a message read from the platform of COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, on November 13, Pope Francis stated that “The ecological debt and the external debt are two sides of the same coin”.
The term “ecological debt” was born during the third United Nations conference on women organized in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985. It appears from the pen of the ecofeminist theologian Eva Quistorp in a pamphlet published by the German Green Party. At that time there was a lot of talk about the debt crisis. “developing countries”. The new monetarist doctrines aimed at fighting inflation put the States of these countries under the control of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund which, to avoid any default, impose structural adjustment policies aimed at reducing their public spending.
In this context, the idea of an “ecological debt” of Western countries is supported by those who denounce an ecologically unequal exchange between the North and the South. It also becomes a slogan for the diplomacy of emerging countries that demand the cancellation of their external debt.
After the Earth Summit in Rio, Brazil, in 1992, the notion was no longer the exclusive domain of environmental activists. Its use is increasingly common, particularly in the world of university research. As the jurist Noémie Candiago points out in her thesis on The ecological debt in public international lawsupported in 2017, then we see the emergence “Different versions of ecological debt, which are linked to different conceptions of justice”.
Material and cultural reparation.
Economists first seize upon this notion to develop an accounting interpretation. Drawing on the methods of ecological economics, inspired by Arthur Pigou (1877-1959) and Ronald Coase (1910-2013), it aims to correct market failures by putting a price on environmental damage. A crucial aspect of their approach is to develop, for use by states and businesses, accounting categories that take into account material flows and ecological balances, rather than just monetary flows.
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