Calamitous waste

Adelaide Advertiser
Wednesday 17/1/2007 Page: 21

China and India have been deemed polluting bad guys in the fight against global warming, but as Jim Krane and Clare Peddle report, Australians are worse.

WHEN it comes to squandering the earth's natural resources, residents of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates - a desert land of chilled swimming pools, indoor ski slopes, monster 4x4s and air-conditioned shopping malls - ranks as the world's worst. America's voracious consumer appetite makes it number two. Unfortunately, Australia rates right up there in the top six, wasting resources like there is no tomorrow.

The average person in these countries puts more demand on the global ecosystem, giving them a vastly larger "ecological footprint" per capita than those in fossil-fuel hungry, emerging economies like China and India.

On current projections, the human race will be using two planet's worth of natural resources every year by 2050. The World Wildlife Fund Living Planet Report ranks countries by measuring each individual's footprint in "global hectares" - the area of productive land and sea needed to provide the resources consumed by an average person.

Australia's ecological footprint measures 6.6 global hectares (gha) per person, compared to a global average of 2.2gha per person - 20 per cent more than what is available on the planet.

This is lower than the latest local figures. Data from the office of sustainability and climate change, in the Department of Premier and Cabinet, puts the Australian average at 7.7gha per person - but South Australians do slightly better. The footprint for each person in SA is 7gha, which means South Australians use 3.9 times what is available per person on the planet. Some 36 per cent of this footprint is made up of the resources needed to produce our food, followed by goods (23 percent), then housing, mobility and services.

All this makes sense: Australia is energy-hungry, our population is widely dispersed and our modern lifestyle is one of rampant consumerism. We have a relatively small population, but when resource consumption is calculated on a per-capita basis, it looks very bad.

Citizens of the UAE measured 11.9gha and Americans 9.6gha per person.

What do these figures mean? Are we heading towards a total ecosystem collapse, permanent loss of biodiversity and erosion of the planet's ability to support people? It looks like it, especially if people around the world continue to aspire to live the American Dream.

Energy consumption in the Emirates runs high for many of the same reasons found in the U.S.: a feeling that the good life requires huge air-conditioned houses and cars, and a disdain for public transportation. The same can be said of here. We're not quite as bad as the U.S. or even Canada, but we're much worse than most of Europe, all of Africa and the rest of Asia.

Developing countries like China and India, with their billion-plus populations, fare better on the "footprints" scale because individuals there consume less. More of them walk or cycle, fewer of them own whitegoods and mod-cons, and there are fewer single-person households and cars.

What we have to worry about is when these countries catch up as consumers. All signs show that they will. It is just a matter of time - unless we can help developing countries to leap-frog old technology and advance to a more energy and resource-efficient future.

Every two years the WWF, Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network work together to produce a Living Planet Report, which offers a robust measure of sustainability.

The report explains: "The Ecological Footprint measures humanity's demand on the biosphere in terms of the area of biologically productive land and sea required to provide the resources we use and to absorb our waste." The footprint of a country includes all the crop land, grazing land, forest and fishing grounds required to produce the food, fibre, and timber it consumes; to absorb the wastes emitted in generating the energy it uses; and to provide space for its infrastructure.

As Australians consume resources and ecological services (such as the water cycle) from all over the world, our footprint is the sum of all of these.

Making matters worse for the UAE are Dubai's audacious developments, including artificial resort islands that have destroyed coral reefs and an indoor ski slope that still creates snow when it is 49C outside.

Jonathan Loh, a British biologist who co-authored the WWF report, says this is really shocking. "Of all the places to make artificial snow, this has to be the most absurd," he says. Its landscape offers little help, with its undulating sand dunes and jagged mountains of bare rock offering precious little greenery to soak up carbon emissions.

Another focal point for Dubai's emissions is the red-and-white smokestacks jutting from gas-fired power plants, and an aluminium smelter that line the beach on the city's outskirts. The plants do double duty distilling fresh water from Gulf seawater, a hugely energy-intensive process that accounts for 98 per cent of the fresh water in a country with no rivers and little usable groundwater.

In Dubai and Abu Dhabi, desalinated water is lavished, Las Vegas-style, on fountains, artificial lakes, swimming pools, resort greenery and even on golf courses sitting atop once drifting desert sands. Desalination also produces most fresh water in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; Gulf countries that also showed high footprints.

The WWF has asked the Emirates government to cut energy use and move toward renewable energy, especially solar power viable in one of the world's sunniest climates. On the upside, the state oil company has eliminated 80 per cent of its wasteful flaring off of natural gas at its oil-well heads.

Still, its small size and population compared to the U.S. and other more populous polluters means that efforts to cut greenhouse gases need to concentrate on the U.S. and other large, developed, industrial countries.

The ecological footprint concept is being used by governments, communities and businesses in Australia and around the world to monitor their use of environmental resources and lay plans for the future.

Here, the State Government recently committed to an ecological footprint account for SA, a priority action of the State's Strategic Plan. The Office of Sustainability has also become a participating partner in The Global Footprint Network.

If you would like to calculate your personal Ecological Footprint, take the survey at www.ecofoot.org (it takes 10 minutes). Then visit the Sustainable Living Choices website at www.sustainableliving.sa.gov.au for suggestions on how to live more sustainably.