Living within our planet’s means
We are consuming 2.5 times more than what the earth’s environment can support. What can be done?
WE are literally living beyond our means and borrowing Earth’s resources.
To be exact, we are currently consuming the resources of 1.6 planets, says Nithi Nesadurai, president of the Environmental Protection Society Malaysia (EPSM).
“Our planet is in distress. Our biocapacity, or the ecological limits by which we all must live, is at 1.7 global hectare per person. Yet our average consumption is 2.9 global hectare per person, which means we have overshot by 60%,” emphasises Nithi during a recent interview in Petaling Jaya.
“This is not good and it means we are shortchanging future generations of their fair share of resources. If we keep going like this, we will have more water stresses, air pollution, extreme weather events, flooding, and it is not going to end well.”
Nithi points out that there also seems to be no signs of this over-consumption slowing down.
“In Malaysia, our consumption is at 4.2 global hectares per person, which means we are consuming 2.5 planets, and that’s above the global average.
“Malaysia has a biocapacity of 2.4 global hectares, more than many countries naturally, because of where we are located and because of our weather and land resources, but we are still at a 77% overshoot,” he explains, quoting figures from the Living Planet Report 2016 produced by WWF (World Wide Fund For Nature).
Furthermore, all the components contributing to Malaysia’s ecological footprint are on the uptrend – carbon footprint, water and electricity use, loss of forest cover – and there is no intervention to show that it’s going to taper off and start going down.
EPSM held a two-day conference recently to mark two major milestones: the 20th anniversary of its introduction of Local Agenda 21 in Malaysia and the 10th anniversary of the introduction of the Ecological Footprint Analysis (EFA).
(Agenda 21 is a United Nations action plan for sustainable development; Local Agenda 21, or LA21, is the local action plan each country adopted.)
Established in 1974, EPSM is the first environmental NGO in the country to focus on how human activities are adversely affecting the environment.
Its Sustainable Living in Malaysia (SLiM) campaign, initiated in 2007, highlights the impact Malaysians are having on the country’s ecological footprint; the first analysis back then showed that we were already living 50% beyond the earth’s biocapacity.
GDP is not everything
The Ecological Footprint Analysis, explains Nithi, shows how much biocapacity we have to support us, how much biocapacity we use, and how much waste we generate.