Big Foot: Eco-footprints of rich dwarf poor nations’ debt
By Susan Milius
The first accounting of who’s stomping on whom finds rich nations leaving supersized boot prints of ecological damage on poor countries, adding up to more than those nations’ debt to the wealthier countries.
Rich nations’ doings during the last 4 decades of the 20th century caused up to $2.5 trillion in environmental impacts on poor countries, Thara Srinivasan of the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and her colleagues estimate. Middle-income nations did about the same amount of damage to the low-income countries.