The “Living Planet Report” examines the “ecological footprint” – or environmental impact – of the planet’s 6.4 billion-strong population.
The report is the WWF’s periodic update on the state of the world’s ecosystems – as measured by the “Living Planet Index” – and the human pressure on them through the consumption of renewable natural resources – as measured by the “Ecological Footprint.” There is a cause-effect linkage between the two measures.
The report said humanity is now consuming over 20 per cent more natural resources each year than the earth can produce.
“It is possible to exceed ecological limits for a while, but this over-spend leads to the destruction of ecological assets, on which the world’s economy depends,” said the report.
These are assets such as: depleted groudwater, collapsed fisheries, carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere, and defeorestation.
The report, which includes more sophisticated data sets than the previous four reports, shows that humanity’s Ecological Footprint grew by 150 per cent between 1961 and 2000.
During the same time period, the report’s Living Planet Index shows a 40 per cent decline in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine species population. This evidence suggests that as humanity’s Ecological Footprint grows, the world’s myriad populations of wildlife shrink.
From 1991 to 2001, essentially the ten years after the United Nations Rio conference in 1992, the Footprint in the 27 wealthiest countries increased by 8 per cent per person, while in the middle and low income countries, it shrank by 8 per cent per person – exactly the opposite of what Rio promised.
The report said that consumption of fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil increased by almost 700 per cent between 1961 and 2001. But the planet is unable to move as fast to absorb the resulting carbon-dioxide emissions that degrade the earth’s ozone layer.
“We are spending nature’s capital faster than it can regenerate,” said WWF Director-General Dr Claude Martin.
The biggest culprit in this regard is the United States. Although it has only 4.5 per cent of the world’s population, it consumes more than 29 per cent of the world’s annual output of renewable natural resources – making it by far the most wasteful society on earth.
The United States has for years been urging developing countries to adopt economic policies that promote “sustainable development,” but there is no sign of the US itself adopting such policies. In fact, its policies in recent years – especially under the Bush administration – seem to have been geared to making its own economic development less and less sustainable.
With more than 120 million vehicles on its roads (50 per cent of the world’s total). the United States is also the biggest culprit when it comes to generating carbon-dioxide emissions that damage the ozone layer, resulting in global warming.
Yet one of the first things that the Bush administration did after taking office in 2001 was to withdraw the US from the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty aimed at reducing carbon-dioxide emissions.
In 1992 President George H. W. Bush torpedoed the UN “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro by declaring that he was not going to the summit to agree to any environmental protection measures that would mean the loss of American jobs. A decade later, his son, President George W. Bush, torpedoed the Kyoto Protocol. No wonder it is said, “Like father, like son.”
In recent years, the global community has set clear targets for sustainability and biodiversity conservation. At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, governments adopted a plan to significantly reduce the loss of biodiversity by 2010. At the 2004 meeting of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in Kuala Lumpur, governments agreed to set national and regional targets for creating networks of protected areas, including new parks, which will help safeguard biodiversity.
Furthermore, all 191 member states of the United Nations have signed up to support the Millennium Development Goals, which, in the words of WWF’s director-general, Dr Claude Martin, “not only address the root causes of environmental degradation – such as escalating poverty – but also include a specific goal on environmental sustainability. Indicators have also been developed, which will help monitor government’s progress on achieving these goals by 2015.”
Says Dr Martin: “Some might argue that governments are wasting their time talking about goals and targets, and should just get on with the job. But such public commitments to address these critical issues provide a golden opportunity. For the first time, the public can hold its leaders accountable for their success or failure in meeting measurable and quantifiable objectives on these critically important issues.”
All this notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that governments today are no further along the road to achieving the Millenium Development Goals than they were seven years ago. Indeed, with each passing year, it is beginning to look more and more doubtful that any of the Millennium Development Goals can be achieved by the target date of 2015.
The bleak picture painted by the WWF’s Living Planet Report is evidence of this fact.
The report said that populations of terrestrial, freshwater and marine species fell on an average by 40 per cent between 1970 and 2000. It cited destruction of natural habitats, pollution, overfishing and the introduction by humans of non-native animals, which often drive out indigenous species.
The waste is appalling. For example, as much as 85 per cent of the take of Spanish prawn fishermen may be by-catch. The damage is not done only to animals. Trawlers and dredgers wreak destruction across the seabed, crushing entire ecosystems of corals, algae and crustaceans as they go. And thanks to subsidies and absurdities such as the EU’s common fisheries policy, the taxpayer helps to finance this rape.
But will governments take heed? Or will they continue to look the other way as the destruction of marine life goes on and on and on? By the time governments wake up to the fact and decide to do something about it, it may be too late to save the world’s fish stocks.
The WWF’s Living Planet Index (LPI) is derived from trends over the past 30 years in population of hundreds of species of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish. Between 1970 and 2000, it declined by about 35 per cent. The LPI is the average of three ecosystem-based indices. The forest species index declined by about 15 per cent, the marine species population index fell by about 35 per cent, while the freshwater species population index dropped 55 per cent over the 30-year period.
“The stark trends indicated by the LPI are a quantitative confirmation that the world is currently undergoing a very rapid loss of biodiversity comparable with the great mass extinction events that have previously occurred only five or six times in the earth’s history,” says the WWF.
The WWF’s Ecological Footprint (EF) is a measure of the consumption of renewable natural resources by a human population, be it that of a country, a region or the whole world. A population’s EF is the total area of productive land or searequired to produce all the crops, meat, seafood, wood and fibre it consumes, to sustain its energy consumption and to give space for its infrastructure.
“The EF can be compared with the biologically productive capacity of the land and sea available to that population,” says the WWF.
The earth has about 11.4 billion hectares of productive land and sea space, after all unproductive areas of icecaps, desert and open spaces are discounted, or about a quarter of its surface area. Divided between the current estimated global population of 6.4 billion, this total equates to 1.78 hectares per person.
“While the EF of the average African or Asian consumer was less than 1.4 hectares per person in 1999, the average Western European’s footprint was about 5.0 hectares, and the average North American’s was about 9.6 hectares,” says the WWF.
In 1999, when the world’s population was slightly less than 6 billion (versus 6.4 billion today), the EF of the world’s average consumer was 2.3 hectares per person, or 20 per cent above the earth’s biological capacity of 1.90 hectares per person (versus 1.78 hectares per person today). In other words, humanity now exceeds the planet’s capacity to sustain its consumption of renewable resources.