Humanity has overshot the Earth’s capacity

Climate Progress

A new report on China’s ecological footprint opens with some grim news for the planet as a whole: The demand humans place on the planet — in terms of land use, resource consumption, pollution, and so on — overshot the Earth’s threshold for sustaining that demand back in the early 1970s. Since then the gap has only grown wider.

The report measures that demand by “ecological footprint,” which takes into account the area people use to produce the renewable resources they consume, the area that’s taken up by infrastructure, and the area of forest needed to absorb CO2 emissions not absorbed by the ocean. The report then compared that to the Earth’s biocapacity, which measures the amount of area available to serve all those purposes.

Both factors are measured in units of global hectares (gha), which represent “the productive capacity of one hectare area of utilized land at global average biological productivity levels.” And as it turns out, humanity’s footprint now outpaces the planet’s total biocapacity to the point that it would take one and a half Earths to sustain our total level of consumption:

In 2008, the Earth’s total biocapacity was 12.0 billion gha, or 1.8 gha per person, while humanity’s Ecological Footprint was 18.2 billion gha, or 2.7 gha per person. This discrepancy means it would take 1.5 years for the Earth to fully regenerate the renewable resources that people used in one year, or in other words, we used the equivalent of 1.5 Earths to support our consumption.

Just as it is possible to withdraw money from a bank account more quickly than the interest that accrues, biocapacity can be reused more quickly than it regenerates. Eventually the resources – our natural capital, will be depleted just like running down reserves in a bank account. At present, people are often able to shift their sourcing when faced with local resource limitations. However, if consumption continues to increase as it has in the past decades, the planet as a whole will eventually run out of resources. Some ecosystems will collapse and cease to be productive even before the resource is fully depleted.

footprint-biocapacityBetween 1961 and 2008, population growth drove much of the increase in humanity’s global ecological footprint. But growth in footprint per capita was also a significant contributor to the rise, particularly in the developed western nations of the OECD and the up-and-coming countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Even though its population is significantly smaller, America’s per capita footprint far exceeds that of China, and actually ranked 6th out of 150 countries measured in the report. And as the report’s description suggests, the per capita footprint is amenable to reform: Shifting to renewable energy, upgrading to energy efficient infrastructure, smart land and water use, and a host of other changes can bring down a population’s per capita footprint while also protecting and respecting its quality of life.

Smart use of energy and resources could also help close the overshoot gap from the other side as well: As the graph shows, the global ecological footprint has essentially plateaued over the last few decades, while the Earth’s biocapacity has continued to drop. Which in turn brings up the limitations of how we currently measure human economic progress — even as global gross domestic product has climbed over the last four decades, global biocapacity has been in a continuous decline.

This article was originally published on Climate Progress. Reproduced with permission

Comments

6 responses to “Humanity has overshot the Earth’s capacity”

  1. Humblebee Avatar
    Humblebee

    Elephant in the room:

    Humanity needs to stop population growth.
    We actually need population decline.

    The most humane way to do this is to opt for having no more than two children per couple and reward those who have less.

    Promote this in third world countries by directing the majority of aid-funding into educating women. ‘Save the children’ type funding is short term bandaiding with no long term solutions.

    If we don’t do this, simple mathematics on population growth and available resources will mean wars, famine and deaths en masse. Nature will reduce our numbers for us, but in a much less humane and controlled way.

    Titanic Earth is heading for disaster and all we are doing is shuffling the deck chairs… surely we are smarter than that… please shut off the engines and put it in reverse!!!

    1. Dave Johnson Avatar
      Dave Johnson

      Or the richest parts of the world (i.e. read “English-speaking) could solve the problem a lot faster by noticing the fact that their citizens use about ten times the resources they need for a comfortable life.

      However, it is much easier, and much better for one’s self-esteem, to point the finger at all those billions of sex-mad poor people. And never mind the fact that the average American, Canadian, or Australian uses about thirty times the resources of the average Ethiopian.

      Note: I’m an American, so I know exactly whereof I speak, with respect to American consumption habits.

      1. Peter Strachan Avatar

        OK. So Dave, what’s your solution? How do you propose persuading over consumers (largely in the West, but also wealthy in India, China, Middle east etc) to reduce their consumption and then, even more difficult, try to tell the poor that they cannot increase their consumption until it looks at least a little like yours in the USA?
        Population is the low hanging fruit in this equation, then we must work on a more sustainable lifestyle for ALL of us.

  2. Tony B Avatar
    Tony B

    It’s assumed that animals can over-breed and multiply and overshoot their habitats, and thus starve and die out, but humans are immune. There’s a cornucopia mentality that when it comes to our own consumption and breeding habits, there are no limits to Nature, and that supplies are bountiful and never-ending. We are a charmed species? Population growth will end, and human numbers will decline, but obviously we can’t do it ourselves. Nature will take control, and it will not be “nice”. It seems our growth-based economies, religious and cultural sensitivities stop us for addressing the taboo subject of population growth.

  3. Amy Avatar
    Amy

    Infinite growth is a mathematical impossibility in a finite world. The sooner people realise this, the better. I’m tired of seeing families in Australia with four or five children each. These people are contributing to the destruction of everyone’s quality of life – and they call me selfish for not having children!?!?

    1. Peter Strachan Avatar

      Congratulations Amy.
      There is a media block which thinks that people die of malnutrition but not of over-population. The sooner everyone joins the dots the better. You may have seen http://www.populationparty.org.au but if not, its definitely for you.

Get up to 3 quotes from pre-vetted solar (and battery) installers.