One has been reading a lot about the global economy lately, with developed economies, in particular, receiving a lot of flak for living beyond their means.
Its now WWFs turn to lash the high-income countries, but for an unfortunate performance in another sphere - the environment.
As the global population approaches the daunting tally of 7 billion people, WWFs, Living Planet Report 2012 highlights how the demand on natural resources has doubled since 1966 and how, if the world continues to consume natural resources at the current place, well need the equivalent of two planets to meet annual demand by 2030!
The global ecological footprint, a measure of human demand on the earths ecosystem, is particularly critiqued. The consistently rising ecological footprint is indicative of the worlds growing tendency for over consumption, which the regenerative capacity of the earth cannot keep up with.
"It is taking 1.5 years for the Earth to fully regenerate the renewable resources that people are using in a single year," says the Living Planet Report, showing how the global population is itself contributing to depleting natural resources.
Unsurprisingly, it is richer nations that need to watch their ecological footprint, while that of the low-income nations continues to be quite low. Not something to cheer for the poorer nations, this shows that worlds poorest are deprived of clean water, adequate food and fuel, making the poverty trap even grimmer for them.
The report doesn forget water either, a resource which is feared to become scant quite soon. Already, about 2.7 billion people in the world - about 40 percent of the global population - live in catchments that experience severe water shortages for at least a month every year.
How bleak does the future look? Apparently, bleak enough, thanks to greenhouse gas emissions, to lead to the world becoming hotter by 2 degrees Celsius in a few years, and this is not a mere two degrees, by the way. A temperature change of this magnitude means a disruption to many global ecosystems, including negative effects on human development and well-being.
The continuing environmental degradation leads to increased vulnerability to natural disasters, health-risks and also resource-driven conflicts. Sadly, it is the poorer people, who are contributing the least to this environmental anarchy, are most affected.
Clearly, the situation needs to be reversed. But an entire paradigm shift and efforts by almost every individual on earth is what will be able to put the earth back on track. Large-scale efforts have to be made to save mother earth, such as resource-conservation, use of renewable energy resources, wiser consumption, and equitable resource distribution at government levels amongst nations are some of the areas to work on.
Already a lot of time has been spent wasting. Nations and individuals ought to wake up now.
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