The Double Debt: Economic and Environmental

Abstract

This book is about the rapid changes we are facing in our environment and their consequences for our health. To summarise its contents, the word “debt” is probably the most appropriate: the public debate is mainly or exclusively focused on national economic debts, and we tend to forget a much more threatening debt looming in the background, the huge debt we have contracted with Nature. The book is an introduction to the constantly moving scenario of the interchanges between environmental issues, economics and health.

The recent Lancet-Rockefeller report on planetary health (Whitmee et al., Lancet, 386, 1973–2028, 2015) draws our attention to the enormous debt that humanity has contracted with the environment. As in the case of the economy, most human activities are currently based on loans from Nature, the extent of which has not yet been quantified. The overall monetary debt in the world has been estimated at 200 K billion dollars, corresponding to 286% of the overall Gross Product (a 57% increase compared to 2007). This amount is approximately equally apportioned, on a global scale, to four sectors: the debts of families, of governments, of enterprises and financial debts, but the share of each item is unevenly distributed by country. The highest ratio between debt and GDP in 2013 was in Japan, and Ireland is the country where the ratio has grown most rapidly. What really counts is sustainability of the debt, i.e. the capacity of stakeholders (private citizens, banks, governments, …) to repay the loans. A large part of the Chinese economic development has been achieved thanks to large loans that the country’s stakeholders will not necessarily be able to pay back in the near future. This premise is to say that the growth of debt and the reactions to it are likely to have an important impact on the health of populations, as the case Greece suggests. In addition, there are many similarities between the economic debt and the environmental debt .