Building material, food, fossil fuels: we take for granted our planet’s natural resources. But we are consuming the resources at such unsustainable pace and patterns that we may be irreversibly depleting some of them, while critically exceeding our Earth’s capacity to regenerate, and falling into ecological debt.
A report from the International Resource Panel, part of the UN Environment Program, states that extraction of primary materials has more than tripled in 40 years, an overconsumption tendency that our industrialized and globalized lifestyle.
In 1970, about 22 billion tons of primary materials, including metals, fossil fuels and other natural resources, were extracted. In 2010 it busted to 70 billion tons. If the world continues to use resources at the same rate it does today, the estimated projection to meet the demand by 2050 is 180 billion tons of material. To maintain our current appetite for resources, we would need the equivalent of 1.7 Earths.
Growing primary material consumption also speeds up climate change due to the large amounts of energy involved in extraction, use, transport and disposal. Other potential long-term environmental consequences include, besides global warming, increase of acidification of world’s waters, eutrophication of soils and water bodies, increased biodiversity loss, more soil erosion and increasing amounts of waste and pollution.
However, the situation is still reversible if we focus on feasible strategies and actions to improve environmental performance. That is on of Enviros’ commitments!
