The dominant discourse promoted by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, other multilateral financials institutions, international banks, governments of the North and other creditors begins with the assertion that the South owes the North. Jubilee South challenges this framework. This framework is intentionally blind to the enormous historical, social and ecological debts of the North to the South, debts accumulated from years of slavery, colonization and neo-colonization, and from the more contemporary relationships of domination, inequality and aggression.

Ecological Debt is a debt incurred not just in the past but a debt that is continuously and forcibly being accumulated today. It is imperative that national, regional and global movements address the issue of the Ecological Debt for, by so doing, they ensure the right perspective in asserting claims over what have been lost, and in strengthening struggles everywhere to build another world.

The Ecological Debt of the North to the South is a fundamental and integral part of Jubilee South's perspective on the illegitimacy of financial debts supposedly owed by the South to the North.

Countries of the North, transnational corporations and financial institutions must account for their carbon debts, toxicity debts, pollution debts, among others, and provide restitution and reparations to the peoples of the South. They must also take responsibility for the cleaning up and regeneration of what is left of Planet Earth.

Jubilee South thanks all those who contributed to this journal which draws materials mainly from the papers presented at the Asia-Pacific Conference on Ecological Debt (June 2002, Indonesia) and from testimonies on the issue presented by witnesses from India and Nicaragua at the International Peoples' Tribunal on Debt (February 2002, Brazil).