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Eco bigfoot
no myth - just look in the mirror - 20081107
Ben Cubby, Environment Reporter
AUSTRALIA'S ecological footprint has just gone up a few shoe
sizes. It is now the fifth-largest in the world, and expanding
fast, an international report has found.
It takes an average of about 7.8 hectares
of land to sustain the lifestyle of each Australian - significantly
more than citizens of Britain, Canada or France - up from
about 6.7 hectares in 2006.
The Living Planet report, produced by WWF,
ranks nations by the level of their impact on the environment,
and found that more than three-quarters of the world's population
take more from the planet than they put back. The average
citizen of the globe requires just under three hectares to
keep consuming at the current rate.
Along with agriculture, Australia's soaring
greenhouse gas emissions, largely fuelled by burning coal
to generate electricity, contribute most to the nation's comparatively
poor performance.
In sustainability terms, Australia ranks ahead
of only the United Arab Emirates, the US, Kuwait and Denmark,
and behind 146 other nations.
"Most of us are propping up our current
lifestyles, and our economic growth, by drawing - and increasingly
overdrawing - on the ecological capital of other parts of
the world," the director-general of WWF International,
James Leape, said. "If our demands on the planet continue
to increase at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we would need
the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles."
The US and China each use about 21 per cent
of the world's resources, though the US has about a quarter
of the latter's population. The report estimated that demand
for global resources outstripped supply by about 30 per cent.
Australia's record of declining biodiversity
also contributed to its poor scorecard. Since European settlement,
27 mammal and 23 bird species have become extinct, mainly
because of habitat loss and the introduction of invasive species
such as foxes and cane toads.
Despite water restrictions and the drought,
we still use more water per person than most other countries.
Each Australian gets through an average 1.39 million litres
a year, the report estimates - the world average is 1.24 million
litres. But those figures are skewed because most of our water
is used in agriculture, meaning that sector ranks as the 15th
highest in the world for water use.
There is a glimmer of hope in the nation's
biocapacity, which is the estimated ability of the country's
natural resources to provide for our needs. If things
continue as they are, we have about 50 years before we are
consuming more of everything than the country can supply.
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