Global health. The current scenario and future perspectives

68 Globalization and factors pressuring the environment Economic globalization has an impact on the environment and sustainable development in a wide variety of ways and through a multitude of factors. The identification of factors linked to threats to the environment requires evaluating the pathways that contribute to the deterioration of environmental quality, which will be described below. However, it should be noted that the process of globalization theoretically leads to the transfer of pollution from one country to another, while the volume of pollutants in the global environmental system remains unchanged. Economic growth and overexploitation of resources The positive effects of the globalization process arise when the increase in economic activity is reflected in economic growth and development in the country where investments are made. The negative impacts, especially of foreign investments, often involve the elimination of competition through the acquisition of local companies in the host country, displacement of local producers and unequal competition between foreign and domestic companies due to different investment incentives, among other impacts. All of these contribute to the expansion of production activities, which must not only meet the internal needs of a country but also those of exportation, which results in the overexploitation of resources and causes land degradation, increased emission of hazardous pollutants and greenhouse gases (GHGs) and pollution from industrial waste, among others. Figure 1 (a) at the end of the chapter shows the temporal evolution of globalization (represented by the KOF Index of Globalization, available since 1970) and the evolution of various indicators for Chile between 1960 and 2018. It can be observed that, up until 1985, Chile maintained average levels of total globalization (50 points) and from the 1990s onwards, its Globalization Index increased and stabilized at 80 points by 2010. The imports and exports of goods and services (as a percentage of GDP) steadily increased between 1970 and 1990, with a decline and stagnation in the following decade, and since 2000, it has shown a significant increase again (Figure 1 (b)). The ecological footprint, which measures the impact of human activities on the environment, showed a steady increase from the 1990s and reached values of 4.5 global hectares per person (Figure 1 (c)); furthermore, it is observed that in Chile, as of