Greeny News

On 21 August our environmental resource budget ran out. Now we're living beyond the planet's means to support us

At the weekend, Saturday 21 August to be precise, the world as a whole went into "ecological debt\\ ".

That means in effect that from now until the end of the year, humanity will be consuming more natural resources and producing more waste than the forests, fields and fisheries of the world can replace and absorb. By doing so, the life -support systems that we all depend on are worn ever thinner. Farms become less productive, fish populations crash and climate regulating forests decline. All become less resilient in the face of extreme weather events.

The date is arrived at by comparing our annual environmental resource budget with our ecological footprint â€" the rate at which we spend it.

The worse news is that this also assumes that the whole of nature is there for human exploitation. Any farmer or ecologist will tell you that for ecosystems to function healthily fallow portions and periods are essential.

In a worst case economic scenario, like the banking crisis, governments can, and did, intervene to ensure that money still comes out of the cash machines. But if ecosystems crash, they cant print more planet.

These same data are used for the production of dates above, also show a creeping vulnerability in the UK. We have become more dependent on food and fuel imports. Deterioration of self-sufficiency have a high economic price as the price, so necessary to grow. But it also harms national security and in other ways.

It was only two years ago that we lived through another food and fuel crisis when prices for both rose suddenly and dramatically. At the time, the severity of the bank failures distracted many from the long-term signals. Increased competition for declining oil reserves and a global agricultural system increasingly vulnerable to climatic upheaval, mean that such events are likely to become much more common.

The oil price is now back up the curve (and the events in the Gulf of Mexico lay bare the difficulties extracting the remaining more marginal oil fields). Major crop failure this year has caused the growth of "nationalism Food".

Following serious droughts, Russia, one of the world's major grain baskets, banned grain exports in order to guarantee their domestic food security. Ukraine, one of the world's other major producers, is likely to follow.

Every week seems to announce new "land grabbing " initiatives in which wealthy nations or corporations buy or take long-term leaseholds on productive farmland in poorer countries, motivated either by concerns over feeding their own people, or with a speculative eye sharply focused on the money to be made from a combination of demand and scarcity rising hand in hand.

to the mudslides in China.

Greater climatic disruption is one side-effect of over-consumption as we pour more waste greenhouse gases from fossil fuels into the atmosphere than can be safely absorbed. Our danger now is that these dynamics feed off each other. Overstretched and denuded by our over-consumption, the productive ecosystems that we depend upon, and rely upon to meet rising demand, are becoming more vulnerable to a destabilised climate.

We need to start scrutinising and acting to correct our ecological debts with at least the same seriousness as is being given to our private and public financial debts. Banks were saved at the point of collapse after several years of ignored warnings. If we leave it that long to correct our environmental deficit, it will be too late.

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