An average European draws about four times as much of the earth's resources as the average Asian, a new report says. The 'ecological footprint' of a North American is eight times the size of the average African's.

These are some of the telling comparisons to emerge from the WWF 'Living Planet Report 2004' launched in Brussels, Thursday. The report examines the ecological effect of modern consumption patterns on natural resources.

"How many fish can we catch before we start endangering the reproductive potential of fisheries?" asked Tony Long from WWF while presenting the report. "How many parts per million of carbon can enter the atmosphere before we start experiencing the damaging effects of climate change? What is the sustainable extraction of freshwater beyond which rivers fail to reach the ocean, or inland waters dry up completely?"

Humanity had already overstepped the limit of the earth's capacity by the end of the eighties, the report says. "We are spending nature's capital much faster than it can regenerate," says WWF director-general Claude Martin.

The fifth edition of the biannual 'Living Planet Report' reveals that while the human population keeps growing, the population of other species is plummeting.

A 'living planet index' estimates that the number of vertebrate animals has fallen 40 percent in the past three decades. Freshwater populations were cut by half between 1970 and 2000, while marine and terrestrial populations dwindled 30 percent. The index looks at the estimated populations of about a thousand species.

Increased energy consumption

The depletion is caused by an increasing demand for energy and natural resources, the report says. WWF estimates that humans currently consume 20 percent more natural resources than the earth can produce.

"Particularly alarming is our energy footprint - dominated by our use of fossil oils such as coal, gas and oil," the conservation group says. The 'footprint' is a rough estimate of what an average person produces and consumes, converted into hectares.
It measures how much land and water area a human population requires to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb its wastes, given prevailing technology.

This is said to have increased 700 percent since 1961. "The 2004 report shows that the average footprint is 2.2 hectares per person while there is only 1.8 hectares of land to provide natural resources for each of the people on the planet."

The report says a North American needs 9.2 hectares on average to satisfy his hunger for energy, commodities and other natural resources, and a Western European 5.1 hectares. In Asia and Africa the average impact on the environment stands at 1.3 and 1.2 hectares.

WWF sets the ceiling for sustainability at 1.8 hectares per person, a number worked out by relating the earth's productive land and sea space to the global population. According to the report therefore, only Asia and Africa follow sustainable consumption. Central and Eastern Europe (3.8 hectares per person) Latin America and the Caribbean (3.1 hectares) and the Middle East (2.1 hectares) all have too big a footprint.

The numbers worked out by the Global Footprint Network are recognised by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). The network was founded by Canadian scientist Mathis Wackernagel, who invented the footprint concept in 1996.

"It's a very accurate method," Erik Paredis from the Centre for Sustainable Development (CSD) at the University of Ghent in Belgium told IPS. "But one can disagree about levels of sustainability."

Policy response

Conservation is not an exact science, he said. "There is an ongoing debate about what the earth can sustain and what it cannot," said Paredis. "Some would push up the limits of sustainability, for example, because they have more faith in technologies for waste processing. But it is safe to say that we have crossed the limits."

WWF is calling on decision makers to use the ecological footprint as a policy tool. But Paredis says "it is too much of a rough concept to use in that way. The footprint takes group parameters of a diverse kind - energy, water consumption, fishery, agriculture, and so on - and converts it into surface area."

That adds up to an image that clearly shows the extent of the problem and of the implications involved, he said. "But if we are talking about testing solutions, it is better to distinguish more between factors. The concept of 'environmental space' is more useful as a policy tool. For example, it expresses water in litres and commodities in metric tonnes."

Tony Long says the new European Commission should take into account the alarming results of the report. "The EU wants the world to believe that it is the champion of sustainable development. Working with mirrors to make yourself look greener is okay for a while, but the effect doesn't last long."