By: Joshua Kuikman
Think of an average day, you wake up and take a nice warm shower, drive to McDonald’s and eat a big mac, maybe see whats new with your friends on facebook then watch some TV before going to bed. Isn’t technology great! Wrong, it is the reason the Earth’s biodiversity is suffering. A new report from the biannual “Living Planet” by WWF says that at current rates humans will need a new Earth by 2030 to be able to sustain our over use of resources. Economic growth has increased our demand for resources like food and technology. Since the 1960‘s our ecological footprint has doubled in size. Developed countries are the main contributor for this. These countries use up the majority of the world’s resources and as resources run out within the countries own boundaries the country turns to other parts of the world. These countries need to find a way to decrease their footprint by using less resources or more environmental friendly resources. The Living Planet Index is a measurement of global biodiversity.
Figure 1: Living Planet Index (“Living Planet”, 2010).
Figure 2: Global Ecological Footprint (“Living Planet”, 2010).
The Ecological Footprint, “is an accounting framework that tracks humanity’s competing demands on the biosphere by comparing human demand against the regenerative capacity of the planet” (“Living Planet”, 2010). As seen from the above graphs as humans footprint increases the Earth’s biodiversity decreases. A human factor that affects the Earth’s biodiversity negatively is habit lose. As human population grows more land is used for farming, fishing, and urban use. Also, by introducing a species to a foreign part of the world it becomes an invasive species and as a result they become predators, competitors or parasites. Harvesting wild animals and plants is also bad for biodiversity. Lastly pollution ruins the environment by killing organisms. These factors were main contributors in the Earth’s ecological footprint which exceeded the Earth’s biocapacity by fifty percent in 2007.
Developing countries tend to have a smaller footprint than those of developed countries. Developing countries also have a higher rate of biodiversity loss and as a result have inadequate clean water, land, food and materials. This makes it almost impossible for poor countries to prosper. The reason for developed countries using such a large amount of resources is technology. These richer countries have the technology able to exploit resources at a higher rate. They are able to effectively clear more land in shorter amounts of time for agricultural and urban uses. Also, by having so much technology so close at hand developed countries pollute a’lot more, mainly through fossil fuel products like cars. By the year 2030 humans will need the capacity of two Earths to sustain natural resource consumption and absorb carbon dioxide. If everyone on the Earth used as many resources as an average American we would need four and a half Earths to sustain us.
To combat this problem developed countries need to lower their footprint on this planet by using less technology. By doing this humans would pollute much more insignificantly. Also, we would not be able to use as many resources. These two factors combined should cause the Earth’s biodiversity should start to increase.
Reference List:
“Living Planet”. (2010). WWF. Retrieved October 14th, 2010, from http://
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