Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
like drawing on the capital from a bank account, eventually the resource will be
depleted. At present, people are often able to shift to another source when a resource
is depleted. However at current consumption rates, these sources will eventually run
out of resources too - and some ecosystems will collapse.
In the language of sustainable development, to meet today's needs we are raiding
our children's inheritance, leaving them with less for the future. If all human beings
adopted the lifestyles of people living in the high-income countries of Western
Europe and the United States, the world would be living way beyond its means.
To sustain the entire world's population with a lifestyle currently enjoyed by the
average resident of the United States would require a productive area equivalent to
five planets.
A brief summary of ecological footprint data is presented in
Table 13.3.
For
comparative purposes, this table shows results for the same countries as those
selected in
Table 13.1
(on page
220). Analysing the two tables, therefore, indicates
the resources that are being consumed to maintain the present levels of economic
activity (GNI). The figures must be read with considerable care. It is evident that on
a per capita basis the low and middle-income countries, represented here by India
and China, have smaller ecological footprints than high-income countries. However,
because of their extremely large populations, both India and China have a far bigger
total ecological footprint than many high-income countries, bigger than countries
such as Japan, Norway and the UK.
Table 13.3
ranks the countries according to
their total ecological footprint. In fact, two countries alone - the United States and
China - are responsible for over a quarter of the world's ecological footprint; 28 per
cent on the basis of 2008 figures and possibly higher today.
Table 13.3
The ecological footprint of selected economies
Population
Total
ecological
footprint
(million gha)
Per capita
ecological
footprint
(gha/person)
Per capita
biocapacity
(gha/person)
Ecological
surplus
(deficit)
(gha/person)
2008 Data
(millions)
6739.6
1358.8
305.0
1190.9
126.5
61.5
4.8
World
China
United States
India
Japan
United Kingdom
Norway
18192
2895
2193
1036
528
290
23
2.7
2.1
7.2
0.9
4.2
4.7
4.8
1.8
0.9
3.9
0.5
0.6
1.3
5.4
-0.9
-1.3
-3.3
-0.4
-3.6
-3.4
0.6
Source:
Adapted from National Ecological Footprint Accounts, 2011 edition.
Another way of assessing sustainability at a national level is to compare a
country's consumption against its national biocapacity - that is, the resources it
can produce sustainably (including managing wastes) within its own borders. A
national biocapacity can be expressed in terms of global hectares, or global hectares
