Ecological Creditor

There will be two posts today, the first will be on Ecological Creditors and the second one later today will be on Ecological Debtors.

Ecological Creditor nations are those who have biocapacity larger than their ecological footprint. There will be an Ecological Creditor Nations Summit later this year in October. Less than 20% of the nations in the world are ecological creditors. Here are two great graphics from Global Footprint Network showing the level of credit/debt that nations have as well as in the past.

You can see that there are generally fewer ecological creditor in the top graphic in 2006 and in fact a large majority of the population of the world resides in the countries with ecological debt. this has some justice implications for many of the creditor nations, which are developing countries. As development has risen in the past, nations have turned from creditors to debtors. How to have healthy development in these creditor nations without decreasing their credit contribution to the earth's ecological footprint is important. It is probably much more important to find ways to decrease the debt producing nation's footprints than restrict development or focus solely on the creditor nations.

If you are looking for a lot more information on this the 2009 Ecological Footprint Atlas is a 111 page document with so much information!