India and an overburdened planet

The World Wildlife Fund's 10th edition of “The Living Planet Report” paints an ecological picture that shows the earth in a state of poor health.

October 06, 2014 04:40 pm | Updated November 27, 2021 04:20 pm IST

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In per capita terms, the lifestyle of an Indian places less demands on the ecosystem than that of the citizens of many other countries. But this is when the picture changes: India, ranked 135th in terms of ecological footprint per capita, is pushed up to the third place overall when the country's population is taken into consideration.

These are among the revelations made by the 2014 Living Planet Report released recently by World Wildlife Fund.

With each passing year the trend of demanding more of the earth and its natural resources than what it can actually provide us with is getting stronger in more and more countries. "The Ecological Footprint shows that 1.5 earths would be required to meet the demands humanity makes on nature each year. These demands include the renewable resources we consume for food, fuel and fibre, the land we build on, and the forests we need to absorb our carbon emissions," the report says.

The ecological footprint is "a measure of how much biologically productive land and water an individual, population or activity requires to produce all the resources it consumes, and to absorb the waste it generates, using prevailing technology and resource management practices." It measures the area (in hectares) required to supply the ecological goods and services we use as against the land actually available to produce these (biocapacity). Both biocapacity and ecological footprint are expressed in a unit called global hectare (gha).

Data from 2010 reveals that the per capita ecological footprint had exceeded global per capita biocapacity (1.7 gha) in 91 of 152 countries. Kuwait, which tops the table, has a per capita ecological footprint exceeding 10 gha, while India has a gha much below the global average of 1.7.

India and nine other countries account for almost 60 per cent of the world’s total biocapacity; for many of these countries forest land contributes significantly to total biocapacity.

Again India, followed by USA and China have a significantly large 'water footprint of production' - which is the the total volume of freshwater a country uses to produce good and services, whether they are consumed locally or exported. And these are also countries which experience moderate to severe water scarcity in different regions during the year.

These three countries also contain 8 of the top 10 most populous basins experiencing almost year-round water scarcity. "High levels of water scarcity – a dire situation for local populations – are likely to be compounded by climate change, further population growth and the rising water footprint that tends to accompany growing affluence," the report says.

The report had also conclueded that populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish around the globe dropped 52 percent between 1970 and 2010. Low-income countries suffer more of this loss of biodiversity.

And the just-released Global Biodiversity Outlook prepared by the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity states that pressures on biodiversity will continue to mount till 2020. The status of biodiversity will continue to decline, despite the increase in responses to the loss of biodiversity at different levels.

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