Ökologische Schuldner- und Gläubigerländer
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The New Wealth of Nations
As resource pressures escalate, ecological wealth will emerge as a growing geopolitical force, playing an increasingly important role in determining countries’ competitiveness and its citizens’ ability to lead secure, rewarding lives.
Today, 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries that use more resources than what is renewably available within their own borders. These countries rely for their needs on resource surpluses concentrated in ecological creditor countries, which use less biocapacity than they have. As overshoot increases, growing ecological scarcity will increasingly influence and reshape our world map, from the 20th century distinction between “developing and developed” countries to one of Ecological Creditor countries and Ecological Debtor countries.
The Ecological Creditor Initiative
The Ecological Creditor Initiative Global Footprint Network has started in partnership with the Community of Andean Nations (CAN) aims to convene ecological creditor nations and initiate a dialogue on the growing significance of biocapacity. In an ecologically-constrained world, nations will start to recognize the advantage of aligning their priorities with their natural wealth in order to ensure human health and well-being, secure lasting economic success, and avoid resource calamities.
As ecological creditor countries become increasingly rare, it will become crucial for debtor nations to forge collaborative relationships with these creditor countries to maintain stable economies. This Initiative will help explore and define these possibilities, first with creditor countries, who may more easily recognize the advantage of rethinking their development strategies, then expanding to debtor countries who will also begin to see the advantage of maximizing their resource efficiency and increasing the ecological reserves.
Understanding this new distinction of wealth can help lead climate negotiations and climate policy changes down a more productive path, empowering all countries, whether ecological debtors or creditors, to implement aggressive sustainability policies.
Through collaboration, the Ecological Creditor Initiative will bring the significance of ecological limits to the forefront. We will work toward making climate change discussions more robust by tightly linking national interests to positive sustainability actions. And finally, we will broaden the climate debate to include the widest range of ecosystem pressures: marine, forest, cropland, grazing land, fishing grounds, and carbon.
Read an article in Australia’s WME Magazine about our Ecological Creditor Initiative.
This map was generated using data from the 2008 Edition of the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts.