ABSTRACT
The notion of ecological debt focuses on unequal exploitation of the global commons, and includes pollution, disproportionate use of the environment and ‘theft’ of southern resources by northern countries. The calculations of such environmental damages represent a practical tool for pursuing environmental justice. This chapter takes a more local view of the notion of ecological debt, by applying the same principles around an industrial site in a Northern country. ‘Ecological debt’ is in this context equivalent to ‘environmental liability’. A company has assets and liabilities, i.e. debts. The environmental liabilities rarely appear in the balance sheets. Similarly, the ecological debts of rich countries do not appear in their macroeconomic accounts. We focus on historically created ecological damage, considering impacts on health and capabilities, the major collateral damages inflicted in the recent past by the emissions of a particular site in Belgium run by the company UMICORE. In the first section, we present the notions of environmental justice, ecological debt and particularly the idea of ‘private ecological debt’ or environmental liability. The second section describes the methodology for evaluating the ecological debt in the case under study. Section three shows the calculations and results. In section four, we discuss the advantages of collaborative or co-operative research between scientists and civil society actors, which lie at the heart of the present book, and the resulting practical and theoretical contributions of this study.
