Source AFP ...
Earth "lives on credit" until the end of the year
Monday 16 August 2010, 15: 21
Starting Saturday, the Earth will live on credit for its resources until the end of the year, according to a calculation of "Global Footprint Network". According to the NGO, "it took 9 months to exhaust the ecological budget of the year".
From August 21 and until the end of the year, the Earth will live on credit resources of the planet.
Each year, the Global Footprint Network (GFN) calculates the day when humanity's consumption of natural resources has exhausted what the planet is able to provide in a year, from freshwater filtration to supply. raw materials, including food.
This year 2010, announces the NGO Monday, the "Earth Overshoot Day" - literally the "day of the overtaking" - will be held on Saturday August 21. "Which means it took less than nine months to exhaust the ecological budget of the year," says GFN President Mathis Wackernagel.
Last year, the limit was reached September 25, but it is not because consumption has wrapped up, he says. "It's just that this year, we have revised all our data and realized that so far, we had overestimated the productivity of forests and pastures: in short, we had exaggerated the capacity of the Earth" to regenerate and absorb our excesses. "We redo the calculations every year and we try not to exaggerate: if we do not know or if we have a doubt, we take the most conservative data."
GFN calculates the supply of services and resources by nature and compares them to human consumption and its discharges - waste but also polluting emissions like CO2. "At the end of the 1980 years, our ecological footprint was roughly equivalent to the size of the earth. Today is 50% more, "insists the NGO. "If you spend your annual budget in nine months, you will probably be extremely worried: the situation is not less serious when it comes to our ecological budget," says Wackernagel. "Climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water and food shortages are all signs that we can no longer continue to consume on credit."
At this stage, he continues, the data on the recession since 2008 are not yet very clear, "even if the preliminary data show that it has had a significant impact on consumption, such as the energy that has fallen in Europe. and in the United States. But this is not the case in China.
To reverse this trend, we must "get the world population to begin to decline", a taboo that is gradually emerging among demographers and environmental advocates, including within the United Nations. "People think it would be terrible, for us it would actually be an economic benefit. But it's a choice. We do not want it yet, "says Wackernagel.
(Afp)
