Graph of the Day: Australia’s unsustainable size 13 footprint

Australia has been named as one of the world’s worst offenders behind unprecedented biodiversity loss and damage to the Earth’s ecosystems driven by humanity’s unsustainable demand on the planet.

The tenth edition of the WWF’s Living Planet report, launched on Tuesday at the United Nations in Geneva, warns that the world is living well beyond its means, demanding 50 per cent more from the planet than nature can sustain – a pattern that is driving dramatic declines in biodiversity since 1970.

The report also ranks Australia – which was dubbed the Saudi Arabia of the South Pacific in a Slate.com article last week, thanks to its heady combination of anti-climate policy and world-leading pollution levels – as having the 13th largest Ecological Footprint per capita, out of the 152 countries included in the study.

You can see Australia’s ecological shame illustrated in the graph below, but to add to it, here’s another scary image for you: if the rest of the world lived like Australians, we’d need 3.6 planet Earths to sustain our total demands on nature.

As it stands, though, our unsustainable lifestyles mean that representative populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles have declined by 52 per cent since 1970.Freshwater species have suffered a 76 per cent decline, almost double that of land and marine species.

“Of the populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish tracked around the world since 1970, we’ve lost more than half in just two generations,” said WWF-Australia CEO Dermot O’Gorman.

“The scale of biodiversity loss and damage to the ecosystems essential for our well-being is alarming, and a direct consequence of the way we produce and consume.”

The report shows that the biggest threat to biodiversity comes from the combined impacts of habitat loss and degradation. Fishing and hunting are also significant threats. Climate change is becoming increasingly worrisome, with research cited in the report finding that climate change is already responsible for the possible extinction of species.

This comes just months after a United Nations study warned of the growing impacts of carbon pollution driven climate change and supporting the finding that it is already affecting the health of the planet.In Australia, carbon pollution makes up over half of our ecological footprint, highlighting the need for decisive action to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

“If we are to live within our means and stop this ecological overshoot, we need to introduce urgent measures that address our growing carbon footprint,” O’Gorman said.

“Scaling up the Renewable Energy Target and strengthening the government’s pollution reduction target from 5 per cent to at least 25 per cent by 2020 are two ways to achieve this,” he said.