Climate Change

POLLUTER PAYS PRINCIPLE

June 11, 2026 No Comments

What is the Polluter Pays Principle?

The Polluter Pays Principle is an environmental and economic concept which states that those responsible for pollution i.e. industries, businesses, should bear the cost of managing and correcting the damage caused to the environment and human health.

Originating from the 1992 United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and  Development, the principle aims to prevent polluters from shifting the burden of pollution onto society and instead parties responsible for environmental damage should face the repercussions of their actions through mitigation, compensation or remedy.

In modern climate policy, the principle is increasingly applied to greenhouse gas emissions through carbon pricing mechanisms such as carbon taxes and emissions trading systems (cap-and-trade).

How to implement the Polluter Pays Principle?

The principle is founded on the idea that pollution costs should not be externalized to communities and future generations. Instead, industries and individuals responsible for environmental harm should pay for prevention, conduct major clean ups, and employ mitigation measures. Examples include factories safely disposing hazardous waste and by products or shipping companies compensating or conducting major clean ups for oil spills into marine ecosystems and mitigating its ecological impact.

‘Polluter Pays Principle’ can be used to tackle a wide range of ecological threats. These include the release of greenhouse gases, air and water pollution by industries, and the loss of natural habitats due to deforestation. Climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions is also an environmental challenge where this principle can be applied.

However, economists consider it a ‘market failure’ since current market prices do not reflect the social and environmental toll of emissions, leaving the public to absorb the resulting health and ecological burdens while polluters evade accountability. To address this, we need to ‘internalise’ the costs of future environmental damage by putting a price on the thing that causes it – namely greenhouse gas emissions.

One way to put a cost on future environmental damage is through carbon pricing often referred to as the social cost of carbon (SCC). It is an estimate of the economic damage caused by the release of an additional ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A carbon price is an economic policy tool that assigns a financial cost to greenhouse gas emissions, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2) that corresponds to the potential cost incurred through the impact of future climate change events, forcing emitters to take on, or internalise, the cost of pollution thus encouraging industries and businesses to reduce pollution. This can be implemented in two major ways:

  • Carbon taxes, where polluters pay a fixed charge for each tonne of emissions produced.
  • Emissions trading systems (cap-and-trade), where governments set emission limits or ‘cap’ that can be emitted by participating entities for a specific period, and these entities are allowed to purchase emission allowances or carbon credits that they can trade in based on their pollution levels.

These systems encourage cleaner production methods, innovation in green technologies, and investment in sustainable energy solutions. Economists also support global and uniform carbon pricing to prevent companies from relocating to countries with weaker environmental regulations, often called “pollution havens”. However, it should be noted that although it is a great initiative, carbon taxes are politically difficult to impose.

Conclusion

The Polluter Pays Principle is an important tool for promoting environmental responsibility and sustainable development. By ensuring that polluters bear the financial consequences of their actions, the principle helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions, correct market failures, and protect society from environmental harm. Through carbon pricing systems such as taxes and emissions trading, governments can encourage cleaner technologies, support climate action, and create a fairer system where the true costs of pollution are no longer passed on to the public or future generations.

Climate Change

Debt-for-Nature Swaps: A Win-Win for Climate and Development

July 27, 2025 4 Comments

Debt-for-nature swaps are making headlines as a form of climate finance that reduces a country’s debt in return for environmental commitments. With the cost of mitigating climate change estimated to be between $3-6 trillion a year globally by 2050 according to International Monetary Fund (IMF), innovative financial mechanisms like debt-for-nature swaps are crucial for supporting developing countries in their transition to a more sustainable and climate-resilient economy.

What are Debt-for-Nature Swaps?

These are financial instruments that allow countries to free up fiscal resources to combat climate crisis and protect nature and biodiversity. By doing this, countries can focus on sustainable development without incurring heavy financial burden. Creditors provide debt relief in return for a government’s commitment to decarbonize the economy, invest in climate-resilient infrastructure, or protect biodiversity.

For instance, a debt for nature swap can be an agreement between a creditor (bank or lending government) and debtor (developing country) to allow portions of a debtor’s foreign debt to be forgiven. This is done in exchange for commitments to invest in biodiversity conservation and environmental policy measures. This is most common in instances where debtor countries are at a high risk of defaulting loans and payments.

What are the benefits of debt-for-nature swaps?

A General Illustration of a Debt-for-Nature Swap by Christoph Nedopil

Debt-for-nature swaps offer several benefits. For debtor countries, they provide an opportunity to reduce external debt while investing in environmental conservation and climate change mitigation. For creditor entities, they offer a way to absolve themselves of high-risk debt relations. For the environment, they provide a means to protect biodiversity and promote sustainable development.

Challenges and Limitations

Despite the benefits, debt-for-nature swaps also come with challenges and limitations. Concerns have been raised about the potential risks associated with fluctuating exchange rates, inflation, and fiscal or liquidity crises in debtor countries. Additionally, there are concerns about debtor countries’ potential loss of legislative leverage and sovereignty to foreign entities, especially when bilateral or multilateral swaps are employed. These bonds and swaps can be set aside in favour of the agenda of the creditor and may not align with local conservation needs.

Debt relief can also lead to mismanagement of resources and the risk of corruption especially in low-income countries with a tendency to favour the elite and exclude communities at the grassroot that are primary custodians of natural resources.

Case Studies

Several countries have successfully implemented debt-for-nature swaps. For example, in 1987, Conservation International arranged the world’s first debt-for-nature swap, forgiving a portion of Bolivia’s foreign debt in exchange for the Bolivian government setting aside 3.7 million acres of land adjacent to the Amazon Basin for conservation purposes. In Africa, Seychelles in collaboration with United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Global Environment Facility, Global Environment Facility, and the Nature Conservancy was able to protect up to 400,000 km² of ocean through a debt forgiveness of $27 million.

Conclusion

Debt-for-nature swaps offer a promising approach to addressing the climate crisis while promoting sustainable development. While there are challenges and limitations to be addressed, the benefits of debt-for-nature swaps make them an important tool in the fight against climate change. As the global community continues to seek innovative solutions to the climate crisis, debt-for-nature swaps are likely to play an increasingly important role.

Climate Change

CARBON CREDITS & CARBON OFFSETTING

June 17, 2024 No Comments

WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT CARBON CREDITS

According to a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, projected global warming may reach 0.8oC to 1.2oC above pre-industrial levels between 2032 and 2052. The rise in temperature is predominantly due to anthropogenic activities such as burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial emissions.

Companies seeking to offset their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have turned to carbon credits and carbon offsets. This is because governments have been pressuring the private sector to limit GHG emissions forcing these companies to turn to financial products that help them offset their environmental footprints through carbon credits and offsets.

What are carbon credits?

Carbon credits life cycle (https://carbonwise.co/how-are-offsets-used-the-life-cycle-of-a-carbon-offset/)

Carbon credits can be thought of as a tradeable permit that allows a polluter to emit one tonne of carbon dioxide or the equivalent amount of a different greenhouse gas. A carbon credit represents the right to emit or release emissions. A single credit represents 1 ton of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) that the company is allowed to emit. They can be purchased by an individual or a company to make up for carbon dioxide emissions that come from industrial production or transport. Meaning institutions can emit carbon dioxide emissions and in exchange the world’s large reserves of forest will soak up the emitted CO2. The tradable component of carbon credits makes it a very lucrative market, known as the carbon market, with revenues of about $95B in 2023 and is projected to grow in the future.

The number of credits issued to a particular company or organization represents its emissions limit. If a company can limit its emissions below its cap, it is considered compliant and has a surplus of carbon credits. These can be retained for future use, or they can be sold immediately into the carbon compliance market overseen by a regulatory body. This market is known as a cap-and-trade market.

If the company cannot keep emissions under its limits, they are non-compliant and must make up that difference. Over-emitters turn to the carbon market to purchase carbon credits from an under-emitter within the cap-and-trade network.

How are Carbon Credits Created?

Carbon credits are based on the cap-and-trade model that was used to reduce sulphur pollution in 1990. They are most often created through agricultural or forestry practices although a credit can be made by nearly any project that reduces, avoids, destroys, or captures emissions. Individuals or companies looking to offset their own GHG emissions can buy these credits through a middleman or those directly capturing the carbon (voluntary market). Carbon credits, meanwhile, make it more expensive for companies in regulated industries to pollute by charging them per unit of carbon they emit, which has the effect of disincentivizing future emissions.

Alternatively, they can buy the credits through compliance or involuntary markets. Involuntary markets are those set up by governments when they set a cap on how many tons of emissions certain sectors such as oil, transport, energy, or waste management, can release. Companies must trade to stay within the limit.

There are about 75 carbon compliant markets in operation around the world.

Regulators, businesses, and environmentalists have debated globalizing a cap-and-trade market for carbon. However, it is challenging to agree on a common time frame, common price, common measurement, and transparency. The voluntary market’s rapid acceleration is largely driven by recent corporate net-zero goals and interest in meeting international climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.

Drawbacks of Carbon Credits

Carbon credits can easily be labelled as green washing. A company can claim they have bought carbon credits from a business outside a regulated exchange, and this does not lower the overall amount of GHGs released by buyers. It gives corporations a way to claim they are eco-friendly without reducing their overall emissions.

The voluntary market operates largely unchecked by federal or local regulators. The market does not have a cap on how many tons of emissions can be offset and the driving oversight is a set of standards. There are a few respected standards organizations that validate carbon credits. Verra, a non-profit has set the most widely used standard to validate credits called the Verified Carbon Standard. Since its launch, it has registered 1,750 projects around the world and verified 796M carbon units.

What is carbon off-setting?

Carbon credits and carbon offsets are often mistakenly used interchangeably, but they are not the same. However, the unit of measurement for both is tonnes of CO2e. Carbon credits are a measurement unit to cap emissions while carbon offsets can be thought of as a measurement unit to compensate an organization for investing in green projects or initiatives that remove emissions.

Carbon offsets are designed to help consumers or organizations counteract the impact of future or past emissions. Offsets can also be traded in a voluntary carbon market. Carbon offsets occur when a polluting company invests in a project that reduces GHGs for example a project that deals with sustainable clean energy to counteract the use of fossil fuels. In a nutshell, carbon offsetting cancels out emissions produced in one place with the reduction of emissions in another place i.e. projects such as wind farms or tree planting exercises. Another way to look at it are carbon offsets are a way to make amends for committing an environmental sin of polluting the air with GHG emissions.

According to the World Bank, carbon credits regulate around 18% of the world’s emissions, while carbon offsets track far less than 1%.

It is important to note that offsets are not created or distributed by a specific regulatory body. They are also not limited to individual regulatory jurisdictions and can be traded on any number of voluntary markets around the world.

Conclusion

Carbon credits and carbon offsets are a great incentive theoretically to deter and curb unregulated carbon emissions. However, there needs to be increased monitoring of the projects to ensure adequate absorption and capture of GHGs that these carbon markets propose to be undertaking. In the long run this will make carbon markets a major solution to climate change.

Waste Management

Everything You Need To Know About Waste Colonialism

October 3, 2022 4 Comments

Waste colonialism refers to the disposal of hazardous waste by high GDP countries into low GDP countries. The term was first recorded in 1989 at the United Nations Environmental Basel Convention when African nations raised concerns over the issue.

Apart from hazardous waste, high GDP countries have also been exporting their plastic and paper waste to poorer countries in a bid to cut down on their carbon emissions from incineration of the waste. These poor countries often lack effective waste management systems.

Until January 2018, about half of the world’s plastics and paper products were being dumped and recycled in China. However, in a bid to protect its environmental interests and the health of its populace, China banned imports of plastics and paper. This ban was also propelled by the mixing of hazardous wastes in the solid waste imported by China.

This left countries in the West struggling with the build-up of plastic and paper waste, as they scrambled to look for new markets for the waste. In 2020, a huge consignment of 141 containers filled with plastic waste being exported to Turkey from Germany was rejected by authorities as they had just banned the importation of mixed plastic waste.

 

Exporters and Importers of Plastic Waste – Statista

The problem

High GDP countries are the world’s largest producers of waste yet some of them are labelled as the world’s top recyclers. In 2017, Germany was named the world’s top recycler by the World Economic Forum. However, according to 2021 data from Statista, Germany was the leading exporter of plastic waste in the European Union.

Companies in the fossil fuel industry also continue to lobby for more plastic manufacturing and have set their eyes on Africa as the next market. During the US-Kenya trade negotiations in 2020, the American Chemistry Council – an industry group representing the world’s largest petrochemical companies, proposed Kenya as a future supply hub for US-made chemicals and plastics to other African countries.

If this deal had come to fruition, Kenya would have imported up to 500 million tonnes of plastic waste per year from the US. However, Kenya has neither the recycling capacity nor the storage capacity for this waste. Not only would this have led to more plastic waste in landfills, but Kenya would have had to lift one of the world’s strictest ban on single-use plastics.

High GPD countries generate twice as much waste per capita in comparison to low GDP countries. Lower-income countries already face challenges with their own solid waste and when higher-income countries export their solid waste, they are only exacerbating the global environmental risks brought on by plastic waste.

Who is fighting back and how?

In Asia, a historic leap against waste colonialism was made in 2022 when the US-based organization Ocean Conservancy (OC), retracted its 2015 report that blamed the global plastic waste problem on the continent. This was due to the fact that the report ignored the role played by countries in North America and Europe in plastic waste production. In addition, the report also proposed garbage incineration as a solution which led to years of greenhouse gas emissions.

To make up for its past actions, the OC has partnered with the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) to begin a community- and sector-based restorative process. The restorative process prioritizes on plastic reduction policies.

In Africa, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) and the Break Free from Plastic (BFFP) Africa continue to create awareness on the impact of waste colonialism. During Africa Day 2022, the two organizations together with 69 individuals and 136 organizations released a public statement calling on African leaders to stop waste colonialism in Africa.

What more can be done?

The GAIA + BFFP Africa public statement made some recommendations to what can be done in the fight against waste colonialism. Although these recommendations were made to African governments, they are applicable to all developing nations. The recommendations are:

 

  • Prevention of plastic waste dumping
  • Protection of existing and new legislation upholding right to a safe, clean and healthy, toxic-free environment
  • Exercising their right to refuse shipments of hazardous and plastic waste as provided by the Prior Informed Consent (PIC) Procedure and Information Exchange of the UNEP + Rotterdam Convention
  • Enforcing existing legislations that restrict and prohibit waste imports like the Basel and Bamako conventions
  • Adoption of national systems that are inclusive of waste pickers in waste management decision-making processes
  • Investing in ongoing discussions around global plastic treaty at the local and regional levels to address problems in the entire plastic value chain

What do you think of waste colonialism, let us know in the comment section.

Climate Change

ECO-ANXIETY: CAN CLIMATE CHANGE AFFECT YOUR MENTAL HEALTH?

June 13, 2022 10 Comments

The first time I heard the phrase eco-anxiety was during a Climate Change workshop I attended. It immediately piqued my interest because I had never thought of the impact climate change may have on our mental health. The more research I did the more I realised that it is quite a prevalent issue especially among the youth. This pushed me to write this article on it to discuss the issues surrounding eco-anxiety and what you can do to manage it.

What is Eco-anxiety?

Eco-anxiety is the chronic or severe fear of environmental damage or ecological disaster. Eco-anxiety is like generalised anxiety and stress, but it is mainly focused on the environment. Inadvertently, this results in a sense of anxiety that is based on the current and predicted state of the environment with regard to climate change.

There is a branch in psychology that deals with eco-anxiety known as eco-psychology which focuses on people’s psychological relationships with the natural environment and its connection to their well-being and health. Many people go to nature to centre and ground themselves so it’s only natural to get anxious when such a sacred sanctuary is threatened. However, it is not listed as a diagnosable mental health disorder, but it still warrants our attention.

The gradual impact of climate change and the impending doom associated with it push people to have anxiety over their future. Anxiety triggers a fight or flight response which requires a quick solution for imminent danger. Therefore, when people observe impacts like rising sea-levels, deforestation or changes in weather patterns it can cause them to feel threatened, scared and unsafe.   

Research shows young people are feeling betrayed by governments and global leaders through their failure to take the necessary action to curb climate change which is exacerbating eco-anxiety among the young. According to an analysis by UN, by 2030 carbon emissions are set to rise by 16% instead of dropping by half which is the requirement to prevent reaching the 1.5°C mark set at COPs meetings.

Effects of Climate Change on Mental Health

Source: Iberdrola

Climate change impact on mental health can manifest in several ways:

Anxiety, depression, substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), aggression, feeling hopeless and fearful, and feelings of trauma and shock. Chronic or severe stress can make people prone to other diseases such as high blood pressure, heart disease, sleeping problems, changes in appetite and depression.

Anxiety surrounding environmental issues can stem from real life experiences related to extreme weather such as droughts, hurricanes and wildfires. It hits harder if you have experienced it first-hand or have had loved ones go through it.

In addition, people may feel guilty due to their contribution and that of their generation to environmental degradation. In fact, young people wish to have fewer or no children to avoid them having to inherit a degraded world.

It has been observed that eco-anxiety or eco-angst mainly affects people who work in environmental jobs or as emergency health workers and first responders. Due to the nature of their jobs.

Furthermore, it affects people disproportionately, some people are more predisposed to the effects of climate change. For instance, those in indigenous and coastal communities, in low lying areas and islands and who rely on natural resources for their livelihoods (tourism, fishing and agriculture). Other groups include people of lower socio-economic status, children, young adults and elderly, displaced people, and refugees.

What can you do about eco-anxiety?  

The silver lining in this story comes in the form of what we allow ourselves to consume. We should have access to reliable and factual information albeit in moderation, make greener choices in our day to day lives, team up with like-minded individuals and partake in plant-based diets. Other environmentally conscious practices are cycling and the use of public transport. Calculate your carbon footprint and find ways to reduce it. And finally spend more time in nature the very thing you are fighting so hard to protect and appreciate and build a connection with it. It may not seem like much but this can appease you psychologically and act as a remedy to the situation. Taking positive action can greatly improve our mental health and reduce feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.

Conclusion

It is normal to feel discouraged, angry and helpless over things beyond your control. However, if these feelings are overwhelming and interfere with your daily life it is best to seek medical advice. Moreover, allow yourself to go through the motions and have compassion for yourself. Go a step further and seek emotional and social support which can really boost resilience and optimism.

Biodiversity

Biopiracy: The Unethical Quest To Own Bioresources

April 30, 2022 13 Comments

WHAT IS BIOPIRACY?

Indigenous communities live closely with nature and over the years, knowledge on genetic resources has been passed on from generation to generation which is known as indigenous or traditional knowledge. This includes skills and practices that are developed within a community often forming part of its spiritual and/or cultural identity. Traditional knowledge can be found in agricultural, technical, ecological, scientific, and medicinal knowledge.

It has been common practice for researchers to rely on indigenous knowledge on properties of plants, animals, microbes, and chemical compounds in search of new bioresources. Researchers will collect these bioresources and eventually confirm their effectiveness and potential use. However, when this is done without consent and excludes local communities from commercial profit, it becomes biopiracy.

Biopiracy is the act of utilizing traditional or indigenous knowledge of natural resources for commercial gain without recognizing or compensating the holders of the information or getting their consent. Biopiracy occurs in the pharmaceutical, agricultural and industrial sectors. It can be patent-based, non-patent or simply misappropriations.

Patent-based biopiracy involves the patenting of inventions that are based on bioresources and/or traditional knowledge. Those involved will extract both resources and information without any official authorization and lock out the locals from any profits earned from the commercialization of the bioresources. An example of this is the patenting of a neem tree seed extract in an antifungal spray by W.R Grace, a U.S. multinational corporation in 1994. Fortunately, after backlash from India, this patent was overturned in 2000 by the Environmental Protection Organization as it was determined to be neither new nor inventive.

Non-patent biopiracy is quite like patent-based with the only exception being the form of intellectual property (IP) control used. This IP control can be achieved through plant variety protection (PVP) or trademarks. Misappropriations on the other hand, involve unauthorized extraction of bioresources for research and development without adequate benefit sharing.

An example of misappropriation is the harvesting of microorganisms from Kenya’s Lake Bogoria by a British University researcher in 1992 who later sold them to companies in the Netherlands and US. It was only when the companies were sued that the people of Endorois were paid less than one percent of royalties by some of these companies.

Biopiracy does not always involve foreign researchers or multinational corporations unethically benefiting from traditional knowledge and bioresources. In some cases, governments may benefit from bioresources of its people and fail to adequately share the benefits from their commercial use. An example of this is the patenting and subsequent licensing of hoodia’s (a cactus utilized by the San of South Africa to suppress hunger and thirst during long hunting trips) appetite-suppressing derivative by the South African Council of Scientific and Industrial Research to Phytopharm that later sold the rights to license the drug as an obesity cure to Pfizer. It was only after legal action was taken that an agreement was made to pay any future royalties to the San.

BIOPIRACY AND COLONIALISM

Biopiracy is deeply entrenched in colonialism. Historically, resources from colonized countries would be forcibly acquired and then imported. Similarly, biopiracy is often instigated by foreign entities in developing countries at the expense of marginalized communities. Therefore, wealthy developed nations benefit from the resources of poorer developing nations.

WHAT IS BEING DONE ABOUT IT?

BIOPROSPECTING

Due to the negative connotation of biopiracy many researchers attempt to be on the right side of the law and practice bioprospecting. Bioprospecting is the exploration for products from natural resources that can be developed further for commercial use and benefits the society. Usually, they attempt to do it in a legal and inclusive manner.

Ideally, bioprospecting should include ethical consideration of and consent from the indigenous community, it should further include benefit sharing and material transfer agreements and compensation of the community as well as facilitate conservation efforts from the earnings.

LEGAL AND POLICY FRAMEWORKS

International legal and policy frameworks exist to prevent biopiracy. However, these laws tend to contradict each other. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity recognizes that member countries that have ratified it have sovereignty over their genetic resources, however, the Trade related Intellectual Property Rights agreement (TRIPS) of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) does not.

This inconsistency calls for the amendment of regional and national laws if African countries are to effectively protect their bioresources. In Africa, the African Union (formerly Organization of African Unity) adopted the African Model Legislation in 2000. This model law aims to protect the rights of local communities, farmers, and breeders, and regulate access to biological resources. This model law also has provisions for benefit sharing of genetic resources and plant breeder’s rights.

In Kenya, Article 69(1) of the Constitution of Kenya recognizes the State’s role in ensuring sustainable exploitation, utilization, management and conservation of the environment and natural resources. Article 69(1) also recognizes the need for equitable sharing of accruing benefit from commercialization of natural resources. The Kenya Industrial Property Institute (KIPI) also established a unit known as the Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Genetic Resources (GR) unit (TK & GR – UNIT) in 2009 whose focus is to develop a TK database for Kenya and create awareness among local communities on the importance of TK and GR.

CONCLUSION

The controversies surrounding biopiracy are tangible and must not be ignored. However, the matter is not insurmountable, especially with legal frameworks in place to protect indigenous knowledge. My hope is in the future indigenous communities can get the recognition and compensation they so rightly deserve.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this, let us know in the comment section.

Posts pagination

1 2 3

Welcome To Terra's Liege. If you can't reuse it, refuse it.

X