The study, commissioned by WWF, measured the amount of natural resources needed to sustain a person’s lifestyle, including energy, transport, food and infrastructure.
Australia ranked eighth in the study. The countries with a worse footprint than Australia are the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Denmark, Belgium, the United States, Estonia and Canada.
WWF spokesman Dermot O’Gorman says every Australian person requires about seven hectares to live their current lifestyle.
“The report looks at the ecological footprint of individuals and that’s measured in the report in global hectares, which is a reflection of how much food, transport and urban infrastructure we require to live our lives,” he said.
The report also found the Earth has lost about a third of biodiversity since 1970.
WWF says Australia has an “unrivalled” rate of mammal extinction, while species like the red-tailed black cockatoo and the western swamp tortoise are also on the verge of being wiped out.
University of New South Wales biology professor Mike Archer says Australia has lost 18 native mammals species in the past 200 years.
“I guess we have to ask that hard question; what are we doing in the way that we’re using the land that’s different than what [Indigenous Australians] did, why is it suddenly so unsustainably managed when for 60,000 years it was doing fine?” he said.
National parks are one part of the solution, according to Professor Archer, but he says covering just 11 per cent of the nation is not enough to stem the current species loss.
“The parks are a great beginning but they are demonstrably too small at this point, given that climate change is going to make every animal and plant shift southwards, either 100 kilometres for every degree rise in temperature, or one kilometre up a mountain,” he said.
“We haven’t got too many of those mountains. We have to get bigger parks to give the resilience back to the biota that at the moment we’ve taken away.
“We’ve parcelled the land up in little patches and it can’t respond in the way that it has in the past.”
