The Ecological Footprint concept is explained here. 

Finland was 2nd and Kuwait was 5th to round out the top 5.

World mean is the average per person in the world.

Biocapacity is what the planet can produce sustainably, meaning it can do this year in and year out. So the 2.2 means we are living beyond its capacity, marked each year by World Ecological Debt Day (Oct 6 for 2007).

Folks, I’m finding a lot of neat reports and such as I do this blog, but this report is arguably the one you should read if you want to get an idea of what humans in the various countries are doing to the planet relative to each other and relative to what it can provide. Far more than just the cumulative effect measured by the ecological footprint, there are components on water withdrawals, biodiversities that provide food and other resources, land, crop, forests, energy, each country’s capacity and not just the planetary value, etc. All the countries are included, graphs help visualize things, along with rankings and tables for more exact measures. If I wanted to, I could sit and blog a thousand comparison after comparison, context, meaning and all kinds of things. Pending what is important and/or of curiosity to you, you can look and determine all kinds of things for yourself. Here are a few examples.

Look at how Chinese seem to be living sustainably, on average at 1.6 global hectares whereas the world can provide 1.8, but the country could only supply 0.8. Indians come in at 125th overall with 0.8, at under half what the world could provide at 1.8 and less than the average African (1.1 of the continent’s 1.3 biocapacity), but that the country could only provide 0.4. Australia, on the other hand, uses 6.4 per person but the continent, full of natural resources, offers 12.4. When you look at figures like these, you get a very different view of things, and an accurately different view, too!

For my personal global interest in environment and lifestyle impacts, because I believe that our lifestyle is ultimately the determining factor in environmental impact like the ecological footprint theory believes*, this report is the one report I would recommend you read out of all the ones on the Downloads page, if you only read one. [Envirostats author]

* Ecological footprint theory was the first to look at demand side of economics for environmental impact instead of supply side as other theories.

- Living Planet Report 2006, by the Global Footprint Network & World Wildlife Fund (4.5 MB)

Tables 1 and 2, Figure 18

Biggest and smallest footprints for English cities (per person)

Smallest five

Largest five

You can calculate your footprint at www.wwf.org.uk/calculator

The average ecological footprint of the residents of 60 cities in England, Wales and Scotland was measured by the conservation watchdog World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Unlike the Forbes greenest state statistic just posted in Stat 0505, this uses a well-established criteria of ecological footprint. The link gave the concept but the numbers would be more meaningful if seen in comparison to others societies’ values (per person). Here are a sample from this blog, with links to posts that contain sources.
- Australia = 6.4 global hectares
- United States = 9.6 global hectares
- Nova Scotia = 8.1 global hectares (poorest 20% = 6.2 and richest 20% at 10.7)
- Africa = 1.1 global hectares
- United Kingdom = 5.6 global hectares
- World = 2.2 global hectares
- Earth sustainability = 1.8 global hectares

You draw your own conclusions from the numbers. The values range from about 2002-2006 pending when studies were done for each, and have been fine-tuned in methodology over the years, but are still quite similar that you won’t draw any incorrect conclusions from using the numbers here being different today as opposed to maybe several years ago. Some of the sources also have documents which show other countries’ values for which it was not possible to blog out all in a headline statistic. [Envirostats author]

- The World Wildlife Fund via The Telegraph, Oct 23 2007

A statistic is like a picture in that it tells a story. However, unlike a picture, it rarely ever tells the whole story simply by not having all the information is present. There is a reason the phrase lies, damned lies and statistics¹ has remained timelessly popular, you know!

Does that make this blog a collection of lies, then? Well, that depends on how you see it, like the way you can look at a statistic.

Each statistic on its own may be a little lie by virtue of giving a biased focus instead of a complete one. However, the way I see it, each statistic is a piece of a bigger truth — a bigger truth I am only starting to see myself, which you have seen yourself, but one which none of us could ever see completely.

You see, just about everything we do has an impact on the environment. Unfortunately, most statistics only show an impact, not total impact. Aggregate impact statistics are available, like ecological footprint and life cycle analysis, but they can be hard to comprehend and give too little or too much detail, respectively, to identify some answers for environmental problems. Only by looking at environmental statistics as a collection, relative to each other for context, involving breadth of scope far larger any environmental government department or non-governmental organization could be expected to include, could we really properly assess our environmental impact and determine how to solve them. The latter reason is also an argument for how far more than just environmental agencies and organizations have to work together to help the world’s environmental problems.

But is looking at all the statistics necessary? Well, that depends on how you see it, like the way you can look at a statistic.

I don’t have a statistic for it, but I would argue most of us don’t need a statistic to change something in our lives that would benefit the environment if we thought about it. What we need to see the statistics for is to determine what to change that might have the most impact, whether absolute impact or efficient impact from a small effort, or what to change because it has impacts about which we either did not know or of which did not realize the full extent. The environment works like a web, whether the kind for spiders or for life, in that an impact anywhere has repercussions to other parts, often to extents nobody fully knows. For those trying to create change, seeing statistics in a collection relative to each other allows them to prioritize where to focus their resources, as well as assess their efforts — a  most important part of creating environmental change because without feedback from good indicators, we might as well just rely on conventional wisdom, which, if you haven’t noticed, is not about change.

So have I seen anything challenging conventional wisdom by having seen all the environmental statistics in keeping this blog? Well, no.

I don’t know if I’d say the environmental movement has been around long enough to have conventional wisdoms, but there are definitely some deeply entrenched and popular beliefs, most of which I have subscribed to for a long time. After seeing some of the statistics as a collective, though, I have found my faith in some of these beliefs shaken or destroyed. I’ll save the arguments for other articles to stay focused on my topic, but I’ll list a few:

• I no longer believe most biofuels is a good option for the world, and definitely none for America;
• I’m starting to believe nuclear may be the way for America to go for energy in the medium-term²;
• I also believe far more resources should be devoted to homes, from home building to appliances to lifestyles at home, instead of transportation for reducing global warming.

I’ll stop there because there is nothing to be gained for opposing popular opinion. However, seeing all these statistics as a collective have also affirmed some deep rooted beliefs I have had more than ever. For one, I believe the answer to all our environmental problems could be summed up in a word.

Consumption. Reducing consumption if you really need the clarification.

If you’ve ever looked at any life cycle analysis study, you’d realize how much unseen resources it takes to produce just about everything we consume, from that farmed fish that takes three wild fish to make the food raise it, not to mention other farm environment resource requirements, to how much energy required and emissions emitted to get a pound of beef or that cotton T-shirt. There are also often post-consumption damange to the environment, like methane from discarded food if put in a landfill. Consumption involves so many things in so many ways that by reducing consumption, we could reduce environmental damage in so many areas, from energy to waste to greenhouse gases to toxic materials to natural environments required and biodiversity affected, and on and on.

We have to consume to survive, and consume more to live, but there is so much consumption people do unnecessarily that if we just thought about what we don’t need to consume or consume as much, and act on it, we could prevent so much environmental damage. Material things are particularly bad, from big homes to Hummers to high turnover of electronics, etc. because they involve both energy and material resources to produce and dispose. I’m not saying we’d have to give up all this and go back to cave dwelling. I’m just saying we need to be smarter about our consumption choices. The future is about experiences³, not material wealth as in the past, but it might end up being experiences from material wealth, like how a new iPhone gives you the experience of being popular among your friends just for having one. Put that money to experience a tai chi class or something you have never tried, and which require less consumption. You may or may not be more popular among your friends for your novel venture, but at least you’ll give them something interesting to talk to you about!

Yes, reducing consumption. That’s all it really comes down to. At least that’s what all the numbers tell me. Education comes a close second to know more about consumption reduction, but I don’t think people need to be educated just on that first step of reducing consumption. That is an attitudinal change, not an intellectual one.

Now, how accurate is that message? Well, I don’t know, but I suggest to look at it this way. You know those “standard” polls constantly come out with about 1,000 respondents, being accurate to ±3% 19 times out of 20? I currently have 485 statistics blogged, selected for quality but otherwise randomly fed to me via a wide array of newsfeeds. I’m far from about 1,000 statistics, but how many respondents do you think those polls had to ask before they started seeing the trends and just need to keep on polling to be more certain of them and reduce the margin of error?

That is what I mean by consuming statistics and environment, or consuming, statistics and environment. But either way you look at it, I would highly recommend you look at it in the same way, at the statistics as a collective, with consumption in mind, and the environmental impact associated with each of them. Most of the answers to our environmental problems can be found in each of us, or more accurately, every one of us. We are each like a statistic, in some ways, and that includes being more meaningful and impacting as a collective. Or if we each thought of ourselves as being a statistic of environmental impact found on this blog, since we all could be one, if we all took care of our impacts, then there’d be nothing to write about.

Minh Tan
Envirostats author

Today, October 15 2007, is Blog Action Day as declared by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). Bloggers all around the world are encouraged blog something on the environment today to create synergy and draw attention to the issue. This was my contribution.

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Notes:

¹ Attributed to 19th century British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, and popularized by Mark Twain.

² As a post-scriptum informed to me by a colleague, Bob MacDonald, aka CBC Science Guy of Quirks & Quarks CBC Radio Show fame among others, seems to agree with me on nukes and biofuels. He has different reasons and options, but drew the same conclusions about what is not viable… and he’s far more scientifically informed than me.

³ The Experience Economy, a book on an advanced service economy which has begun to sell “mass customization” services that are similar to theatre, using underlying goods and services as props (Wikipedia description).

Oct 6 2007 

We are living at a pace which requires 1.3 times the resources the Earth has to offer us every year if it were to sustain us forever, and this year’s quota just got used up today on Oct 6 2007, three days earlier than the same marker in 2006. For the rest of the year, we are living on borrowed resources alloted for another year if the Earth is to support us forever.

The Earth only has so much resources to offer us. Even though new sources like energy from sunlight is constantly coming at us, only so much comes per year. If we are to live sustainably, or at a rate of Earth resource consumption that we would never run out of Earth resource, theoretically, we have to consume less than what the Earth can offer us each year if it is to be able to offer that amount forever.

Unfortunately, we are not.

The Global Footprint Network does a calculation called the Ecological Footprint, for which there is a category on this blog, although I have not had nearly enough time to devote to filling out the statistics I have available for that. The Ecological Footprint is measured in many ways, but one way it is measured aggregately is based on how long all the humans on Earth take each year to use up what the Earth has to offer. After that, we are living in what is called ecological debt or overshoot. In other words, we are tapping into more than what the Earth could offer each year if it would sustain us forever, meaning it cannot sustain us living this way forever. We have overshot our fair share, in other words.

Such is the concept of World Ecological Debt Day, sometimes also known as World Overshoot Day*. It is the day during the year when we would have used what the Earth could offer us each year for a sustainable lifestyle, after which day we are essentially borrowing into another year’s resources for a sustainable lifestyle.

Well, in 2007, today, October 7, is 2007 World Ecological Debt Day.

Since this was first measured in 1987, in a different way than the revolutionary method of the Global Footprint but still with reliable results, World Ecological Debt Day was Dec 19. By 1995, it was Nov 21. It was Oct 9 in 2006 (Stat 0062). Now, in 2007, it has come earlier yet again on Oct 6. We are using almost 30% more than what the Earth could provide us in a year. We are only able to do it because the Earth has a reserve of resources, but not one that is infinite. If you want to think of it another way, it will take the Earth 1 year and 3 months to generate the resources we will be using up in 2007.

Or think of it yet another way. Everything “everyone” of us on Earth use up from this moment on, is being borrowed from another year, and ultimately, another generation. However, it is morally wrong to fault “everyone” of us for this, because it is the few relative to the entire human population who has incurred this debt. It is mostly those of us living in the developed world and others not there but living anything equivalent to most typical Western world lifestyle, even one on welfare, who has incurred most of this debt. Human individuals and individual societies hardly contribute “equally” to the debt, as the works of the Global Footprint Network is aimed at showing** so it should not be blamed equally on everyone. Neither should everyone be expected to make an equal change for next year. Those of us who contribute more should change more because we have the most room to change… and I don’t need to tell you who these people are again, do I?

Minh Tan

* Some New Economics Foundation (NEF) in Britain has been doing a lot of PR yelling about this day this year under the term “ecological overdraft”, with example statistics and such cited for Britain, but they’ve got some self ulterior motives, if you ask me, because they are definitely not the experts on this matter! Their stats I’m not questioning, but not using, either, but their talk like it’s their work is another matter.

** See Living Planet Report 2006, by the Global Footprint Network & World Wildlife Fund (4.5 MB) for an example

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- Ecological Debt Day 2007 on the Global Footprint Network, Ecological Debt Day 2007 Backgrounder (0.1 MB)

- For a good general article on the topic, see Reuters, Oct 5 2007

- For British focused articles, wasteful practices and sample Ecological Footprints, minding the point about the NEF above, see the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Oct 5 2007

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Evidence & Calculation of Global Ecological Overshoot (courtesy of the Global Footprint Network)

Overshoot could be the biggest issue you’ve never heard of, yet its causes and effects are as simple as they are significant. For example, in any given year if we cut down trees faster than the forests can grow them back or catch more fish than the oceans can replenish, we begin liquidating the planet’s assets. The consequences of our annual overshoot is an accumulating ecological debt, with consequences including global climate change, species extinction, insecure energy supplies, water shortages, and crop failure. Below are some facts about the effects of humanity’s ecological debt.

FORESTS

• Deforestation, mainly the conversion of forests to agricultural land, continues at a rate of about 13 million hectares per year.
• About 6 million hectares of primary forest have been lost or modified each year since 1990.
• This current rate of loss does not appear to be slowing down.

FISHERIES

• In 2001 the FAO estimated that about 75% of oceanic fisheries were fished at or beyond capacity.
• 25% of marine fish stocks are overexploited or significantly depleted.
• Some stocks have collapsed entirely: for example, Atlantic cod stocks off the coast of Newfoundland collapsed in 1992 forcing closure of the fishery after years of exploitation.
• Human use of capture fisheries has declined because of reduced supply - not due to reduced demand.

SPECIES

• Over the last 30 years, the Living Planet Index, “the Dow Jones index of wild vertebrate populations” has decreased 30 percent.
• There are currently 41,415 species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species , and 16, 306 of these are threatened with extinction.
• The current extinction rate of plant and animal species is around 1,000 times faster than it was in pre-human times – and this will increase to 10,000 times faster by 2050.

SOIL

• Salinization affects 20-30 million hectares of the worlds current 260 million hectares of irrigated land.
• Soil erosion affects more than 1.1 billion hectares of land worldwide, re-distributing 75 billion tons of topsoil.
• Current USA agriculture practices are destroying topsoil 18 times faster than it can be replenished.

CLIMATE CHANGE

• In 1990 the IPCC Report stated the observed trend of warming from 0.3 to 0.6 degrees was not likely to have effect for a decade or more and not directly linked to human involvement. In 2005 the IPCC Report stated that warming of the climate system was ‘unequivocal’, and that this warming is very likely due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.
• Global average temperatures have increased 0.6 +/-.2 °C since the 19 th Century.
• The 1990s are likely to have been the warmest decade of the millennium in the Northern Hemisphere, and 1998 is likely to have been the warmest year.
• Mean sea level has risen by 10 to 20 cm in the last hundred years.
• In 1990, 51% of all CO2 emitted was not absorbed by planetary carbon sinks (oceans, forests), and accumulated in the atmosphere.
• The rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 has gone up by 1.5 ppm/per year in the last two decades, and has increased 31% since 1750.
• 75% of anthropogenic emissions of CO2 during the last 20 years are due to burning of fossil fuels, and the rest comes from land use change, especially deforestation.

DROUGHT

• Climate change affects the global environment and droughts, flooding and changes in seasonal weather patterns will increase as global temperature increases.
• The percentage of Earth’s land that has been affected by drought has more than doubled from the 1970s to early 2000s.
• Dry conditions rose from 10-15% in early 1970 to 30% in 2002 due to increase in average mean temperature.

How is Ecological Debt Day Calculated? [ world biocapacity / world Ecological Footprint ] x 365 = Ecological Debt Day

Put simply, Ecological Debt Day shows the day on which our total Ecological Footprint (measured in global hectares) is equal to the biocapacity (also measured in global hectares) that nature can regenerate in that year. For the rest of the year, we are accumulating debt by depleting our natural capital and letting waste accumulate.

The day of the year on which humanity enters into overshoot and begins adding to our ecological debt is calculated by calculating the ratio of global available biocapacity to global Ecological Footprint and multiplying by 365. From this, we find the number of days of demand that the biosphere could supply, and the number of days we operate in overshoot.

This ratio shows that in 2007, in just 279 days, we demanded the biosphere’s entire capacity for the year. The 279th day of the year was October 6.

Please see the Consuming Australia source report figure for what activities constituted each distribution category, and also a further visual breakdown of the categories into sub-categories.

Note that these values are for households and not a total for the country (which would involve industry) divided by number of households, which is the way this sort of pollution statistic is presented, so be careful about comparing “similar” statistics from other countries to this one. As well, the lifestyle in Australia, with its geographical and population distribution characteristics being somewhat unique to the country compared to others, would render these statistics only accurate for Australia. Still, it might be an interesting set of statistics to show about the western lifestyle if nothing else is available provided the caution against caution mentioned here were noted.

The report which is the source of these statistics is a phenomenal read with far more information than the statistics presented here. The author only wishes similar reports were available for Canada, the United States and other countries having major environmental impacts on the world.

Additional Australian household consumption and environmental impacts could be found at the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Consumption Atlas, a fabulous environmental statistical resource for Australia which, again, the author wishes one were available for Canada, the United States and other countries having major environmental impacts on the world. If anyone knows of any such resources, please do recommend. [Envirostats author]

Nearly half of an average household’s eco-footprint is attributable to food production. Cattle grazing in particular is very land-intensive in Australia. On average it takes three times as much land to raise an equivalent amount of livestock in Australia than in any other OECD country except for Iceland, and countries such as New Zealand and Germany raise more than 10 times the amount of livestock per hectare as the Australian average.

- Ecological Footprint statistic courtesy of Living Planet Report 2006, by the Global Footprint Network & World Wildlife Fund (4.5 MB), page 14

- Cattle raising statistic courtesy of the Selected Environmental Data 2005, by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (0.1 MB)

- Distribution statistic courtesy of Consuming Australia Main Findings 2007, by the Australian Conservation Foundation and University of Sydney (1.2 MB), Figure 3