According to the report, Canada has the 7th largest ecological footprint on a global scale. (A country’s footprint is the sum of all the cropland, grazing land, forest and fishing grounds required to produce the food, fiber and timber it consumes while absorbing the carbon emitted when it uses energy.) If everyone on earth consumed the equivalent resources as the Canadians, it would take three Earths to meet this demand! Roughly, half of Canada’s total footprint is a result of its carbon consumption, derived predominantely from transportation, heating and electricity use. The United States and China each use up about a fifth of the total global biocapacity, but US per capita consumption is much higher. If everyone in the world lived the way Americans do, it would take almost four-and-a-half planet Earths to sustain global consumption habits.
The US and Australia rank among the five countries with the largest footprints per capita, along with the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Denmark. The lowest five nations are Bangladesh, Congo, Haiti, Afghanistan and Malawi. The only regions to remain within their “biocapacity” are non-EU Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
The water footprint is a new addition to the Living Planet Report, a response to the growing pressure globally on our freshwater resources. Canada is ranked 12th on its per capita consumption. This is a measure not only of the water we consume directly from the tap but, more significantly, the water embedded in the products we produce and consume (e.g. 2,900 liters of water per cotton shirt and 15,500 liters per kg of beef). On average, each person on Earth consumes 1.24 million liters of water a year – the equivalent of half an Olympic pool. Nationally, the annual rate varies from 2.48 million liters per person in the United States to 619,000 liters per capita in Yemen. Climate change is almost certain to exacerbate moderate to severe water shortages that have already hit more than 50 nations, the report said.
Growing demands on natural capital – such as forests, water, soil, air and biodiversity – already outstrip the world’s capacity to renew these resources by a third, according to the WWF’s Living Planet Report. “If our demands on the planet continue to increase at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we would need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles,” said James Leape, the green group’s director general, in releasing the study. WWF’s Living Planet Report has been published every two years since 1998 and has become accepted as a leading statement on the planet’s health. It describes the changing state of global biodiversity and the pressure on the planet arising from human consumption of natural resources.
“The world is currently struggling with the consequences of over-valuing financial assets,” said Leape. “But a more fundamental crisis looms, an ecological credit crunch caused by under-valuing the environmental assets that are the basis of all life and prosperity.” The report shows that more than three quarters of the planet’s population live in nations that are ecological debtors – countries where consumption outstrips biological capacity.
The cost of bailing out financial institutions during the economic meltdown, while huge, pales in comparison to the lost value caused every year by ecological damage to the environment, experts say. A European Union study calculates that the world is losing between two and five trillion dollars in natural capital every year due to the degradation of the ecosystems.
Carbon emissions from fossil fuels and deforestation are the biggest drain on the natural economy, underlining the threat of climate change, the report concluded. The Earth needs an average 2.1 “global” hectares per person to produce our resources and capture emissions, but humanity’s per-person footprint is already 2.7 hectares, it calculates. AFP
