The Asia Pacific region is burning through its natural resources faster than they can be replenished, said a new report published today by global non-profit WWF.
WWF and the Asian Development Bank marked World Environment Day with the release of the co-authored report, called Ecological Footprint and Investment in Natural Capital in Asia and the Pacific, which found that the region was building up an ecological deficit because most of its people are consuming more biological resources than their countries can renew.
“Across the Asia-Pacific region, the gap between human demand for natural resources and the environment’s ability to replenish those resources is widening,” said WWF director general Jim Leape in a statement.
The report used environmental data from WWF’s Living Planet Index and from an initiative called the Global Footprint Network to calculate the ecological footprints of individual countries and compare them to the natural resources available.
WWF defines ecological footprint as “the amount of biologically productive land and sea area that humanity needs to produce the resources it consumes, provide room for its infrastructure, and absorb its waste”.
The report noted that the global ecological footprint passed the rate at which natural resources such as cropland, fishing grounds and forests – known as biocapacity – could be renewed in the 1970’s. It further noted that over 80 per cent of the world’s countries are currently either importing biological resources from other countries or depleting their own biocapacity faster than it can be replaced.
Asia Pacific’s ecological footprint is 1.6 global hectares (gha) per person while its biocapacity is only 0.9 gha. A global hectare is a unit used to represent the average biological productivity of the world’s productive land.
While still well below the average global footprint of 2.7 gha, Asia Pacific has two of the most rapidly rising national footprints – China and India.
The region’s top per capita consumers in order of highest to lowest are Australia, Singapore, Mongolia, South Korea, New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Thailand and China.
Negative impacts from ecological deficits include more than devastated environments and the loss of resources for the communities that depend on them, found the report authors, who said that countries with high budget deficits such as Singapore, South Korea and Japan would suffer more than their resource-rich neighbours when commodity prices escalate.
The report provided recommendations to the region’s governments to help them protect four of the most crucial remaining ecosystems, including the Eastern Himalayas, the Coral Triangle, the forests of Borneo and the Mekong region.
WWF said these regions were extremely important because they provide food, water and energy for millions of people, and are home to unknown numbers of diverse plant and animal species.
ADB president Haruhiko Kuroda said that to protect its natural capital, the region must systematically change the way it manufactures goods and provides services.
“The green economy itself can become an engine of growth and the driver for a new generation of green jobs—bringing a higher quality of life,” he added.
ADB has worked with WWF since 2001 to find ways for Asia’s developing countries to integrate the preservation of natural resources into plans for economic development.
For example, a WWF project called Heart of Borneo is an experiment in news ways to balance the environmental, community and business interests in Asia’s largest remaining tropical forest. Borneo loses an average of 850,000 hectares of forest is lost each year due to palm oil plantations, mining and timber production.
A collaboration of NGOs, companies and three governments, the project is meant to provide a model for the long-term management of other natural resource-rich areas.
The report from ADB and WWF includes insights from Heart of Borneo and other regional projects to help guide leaders at the Rio+20 sustainability summit that will be held in Brazil later this month.
WWF’s Mr Leape said, “The challenges presented in the Asia Pacific footprint report show us that we are living beyond our means. But it also clearly identifies attainable solutions that build on the strength of partnerships at local, regional and international levels.”
