Without keeping track of income and expenditure, running a successful business or managing a household is hard. The likelihood of bankruptcy looms more heavily if we are oblivious. But if we understand income and expenditures, assets and liabilities, we can understand our choices and become better captains of our destiny to prosper.
This is why twenty years ago, Bill Rees and I invented bookkeeping for Earth’s most precious resource – its biocapacity, or ability to renew and replenish. Surface areas provide us with biological services and generate biomass. Thus Footprint and biocapacity accounting uses surface areas, adjusted for their biological productivity, as the accounting unit.
Such bookkeeping allows us to compare how much nature we have and how much we use. This bookkeeping – for all nations in the UN statistical system – is at the core of Global Footprint Network’s work since its inception in 2003.
We just released our latest Footprint and biocapacity results. Time trends showing countries’ overall demand on and supply of biocapacity are available on our website. For instance, check out Denmark, Spain, the United Kingdom or Japan. For these countries one can easily see their recent economic history, as they were rocked by the post 2008 financial crisis: these countries’ average demands on nature dropped sharply at the onset of the global financial crisis. Also, the graphs illuminate each country’s resource path from 1961 onwards (1961 is when UN statistics started to be collected more systematically).
Global human demand – our Ecological Footprint– is more than 50 percent larger than the world’s biocapacity. While the world’s biocapacity has grown about 20 percent since 1961 mainly due to more intensive agriculture, demand has increased nearly 2.7 fold, which means that we have shifted away from running a global biocapacity reserve towards large ecological overshoot.
On a per capita basis – and this is how each of us experiences the world – the situation seems even more painful. There is less available biocapacity per person year after year, making it more difficult for Earth to provide resources for each one of us, with particular pressures on those who do not have large incomes.
I sometimes liken the situation to playing musical chairs – only that this is not played for fun, but with brutal consequences for those who have an increasingly difficult time accessing resources like food, energy and water, especially in today’s world of increasing climate pressure.
This situation is among the most extreme in Middle Eastern countries. Their growing populations face with very limited local biocapacity, putting much strain on their economies.
Yet, too little attention is put on accounting for biocapacity. Our situation feels a bit like a pilot flying a commercial aircraft that does not have a fuel gauge on its instrument panel. Such a plane might be fine for take-off, but once in the air and flying, it is dangerously under-equipped. Clearly, pilots need to know: how much fuel is left in the plane’s tank? Is it enough for reaching the destination? Amazingly, however, the dashboards by which we steer our economies, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, have no "fuel gauge."
Of course, the fuel gauge for countries is not just fossil fuel, but the entire range of vital assets that enable us to be fed, housed, clothed, washed and moved.
Yet the increasing tightness is not felt as late as the last drop of fuel enters the air-plane turbine as it begins to stutter. Because we can overdraw our resource accounts so significantly, we can keep going for some time, even as we systematically undermine the resources on which our economy depends now and in the future.
This ability to continue for some time is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because we have the chance to continue without being slowed down by rapid consequences. But it’s also a curse because we can ignore the effects and keep delaying our action. Just as biocapacity deficits form slowly, turning them around also takes time. Foresight is therefore key.
This is why we strongly recommend careful study of the Footprint and biocapacity accounts to explore whether or how these growing biocapacity deficits might affect economic performance and social stability. And this is why we are so proud of our partnership with AFED, and our joint publication of first Arab Biocapacity and Footprint Atlas in late 2012.
Dr. Mathis Wackernagel is president of the Global Footprint Network. For more information: www.footprintnetwork.org