Which Countries Live Within Their (Ecological) Means?

[jrineakter]

The gap between demand and nature’s ability to meet that demand has grown steadily since then. Each year we live in ecological deficit–taking more than can be replenished–we draw down the world’s reserves of natural resources. Ensuring we don’t use up the world’s resources is a global effort, though some countries use up more resources than others.

We wanted to know what countries were the heaviest users of environmental resources, and which ones have the lightest footprint.

We used data from our partner, Global Footprint Network–a research group dedicated to helping leaders in government and finance quantify how much people take from nature and how much nature has to give. Each year they release the National Footprint Accounts, a ledger of the resources each country gives and takes.

The 2017 edition of the National Footprint Accounts contains data from 1961 through 2013, and is available on data.world, where you can query, download, and comment on the data. The data.world platform helps people join, explore, and visualize data from disparate sources to create new knowledge and solve tough problems. Thousands of datasets already live on data.world, with users adding more every day. You can also follow Global Footprint Network on data.world to get notifications when new datasets are available.

Not surprisingly, we found that on average people across the world use vastly more resources than nature can replace.

Countries in Western Europe, East Asia and oil-producing countries typically run the largest per person deficits. Luxembourg has a per person deficit 10 times larger than the world average. Sparsely australia whatsapp number data populated and densely forested South American countries like Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana have the largest per person surpluses.

We saw that a country’s affluence is a strong predictor of its natural resource consumption. Looking just at the 50 largest economies, Canada is the most environmentally responsible and South Korea the least. Of these large economies, the United States has the second worst environmental track record.

Ecological footprint measures how much biologically productive area a country needs to fuel its resource consumption and absorb its waste.

The more fruits, vegetables and grains a country consumes the more farmland it needs to supply that demand. The more animal product it consumes, the more fishing and grazing area it needs. The more carbon emissions it puts out, the more land it needs to pull that carbon back out of the atmosphere and trap it. If you’re concerned with the environment, having a large ecological footprint is a big negative.

On the other hand, “biocapacity” is a positive for the environment. Biocapacity measures how much a country’s land and water can produce.

Densely forested land can be logged for lumber, or left to convert carbon in the air into leaves and stems on the ground. Farmers need land to grow crops or raise livestock. How much the land can provide depends on both how rich it is, and what people use it for.

Both ecological footprint and biocapacity are measured in a common unit, global hectares. A global hectare is the average amount of resources a hectare (roughly two and a half acres) of productive land produces.