History of an expression. In his general policy declaration on October 1, the Prime Minister, Michel Barnier, spoke of a “double requirement, that of reducing the financial debt and the ecological debt”. In a message read from the platform of COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, on November 13, Pope Francis declared that “ecological debt and 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 brochure published by the German Green Party. There was a lot of talk at this time about the debt crisis of “developing countries”. The new monetarist doctrines intended to combat inflation put the States of these countries under the control of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund which, in order to avoid any default of payment, impose on them structural adjustment policies intended to reduce 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 of the diplomacy of emerging countries which demand the cancellation of their external debt.
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After the Earth Summit in Rio, Brazil, in 1992, the notion was no longer the preserve of environmental activists. It is becoming more common use, particularly in the world of university research. As the jurist Noémie Candiago points out in her thesis on Ecological Debt in public international lawsupported in 2017, we then see the emergence “different versions of ecological debt, which are linked to different conceptions of justice”.
Material and cultural repair
Economists first take hold of this notion in order to develop an accounting interpretation. Drawing on the methods of ecological economics, inspired by Arthur Pigou (1877-1959) and Ronald Coase (1910-2013), their objective is to correct market failures by putting a price on environmental damage. A crucial aspect of their approach consists of developing, for use by States and businesses, accounting categories attentive to material flows and ecological balances, rather than just monetary flows.
