World enters into 'ecological debt'

25 September 2009 12:14am

The world is going into "ecological debt", having used up more resources and produced more waste already this year than the planet can cope with, campaigners have warned.

The global recession has only marginally slowed the trend of over-consuming - with the day on which we have used up our annual "budget" of natural resources arriving only a day later than last year.

And with identical products from potatoes to toilet roll being shipped between countries and back again, the New Economics Foundation (NEF) warned planes, trains and lorries were wastefully using more resources than necessary.

The report by NEF said the overall trend over the past two decades had been for the world to go into the red in terms of consuming natural resources earlier and earlier each year as its "ecological footprint" grows.

The footprint is a measure of how much land, forests and seas are used up to produce our food, energy, clothes and other goods and to absorb waste products such as carbon dioxide.

In 1995, ecological debt day fell on November 25, the NEF said.

But the difference in consumption between rich and poor countries is stark, according to the foundation. By 7pm on January 4, one person in the UK would have generated the same amount of carbon emissions that someone in Tanzania would be responsible for in the whole year, the report said.

The overuse of the world's resources is contributing to other problems, including climate change and vulnerability of food supplies, the report said.

The NEF also warned there are "boomerang" trades in a wide array of goods, which leads to export and import of similar products across the world, wasting resources on transport. For example, the UK exports 5,000 tonnes of toilet paper from the UK to Germany and imports 4,000 tonnes of loo roll back, while we import 22,000 tonnes of potatoes from Egypt and send 27,000 tonnes the other way.

Andrew Simms, NEF policy director and co-author of the report, said: "Debt-fuelled over-consumption not only brought the financial system to the edge of collapse, it is pushing many of our natural life-support systems towards a precipice. Politicians tell us to get back to business as usual, but if we bankrupt critical ecosystems no amount of government spending will bring them back."

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