The World Wildlife Federation reports that, assuming the current rate of growth, by 2050 our over-consumption of natural resources will require two additional Earth-size planets to sustain itself. The WWF puts the blame largely at the feet of the USA, which consumes twice as much per head as Britain, and goes on to observe the depletion of many species, forests and so on. Basically, the story goes, it's the end of the world.
Systematic overexploitation of the planet's oceans has meant the North Atlantic's cod stocks have collapsed from an estimated spawning stock of 264,000 tonnes in 1970 to under 60,000 in 1995.
The study will also reveal a sharp fall in the planet's ecosystems between 1970 and 2002 with the Earth's forest cover shrinking by about 12 per cent, the ocean's biodiversity by a third and freshwater ecosystems in the region of 55 per cent.
The Living Planet report uses an index to illustrate the shocking level of deterioration in the world's forests as well as marine and freshwater ecosystems. Using 1970 as a baseline year and giving it a value of 100, the index has dropped to a new low of around 65 in the space of a single generation.
(Thanks, Pat!)
