Credit Crunch is Nothing, Ecological Crunch Coming

Over the past few months, we have been bombarded with facts and figures about the world economic crisis and the credit crunch.

Now a study called the Living Planet report says that the world is heading for a far more devastating crisis with what they call an “ecological credit crunch”.

According to the report, people are using natural resources much faster than they can possibly be replenished and pushing the world quickly towards an ecological disaster.

According to the report, the world is using the 30% more than the Earth can give back in a 12 month period.

One of the main causes of this increasing imbalance is that we are consuming more as our population grows and new technology increases.

We are constantly discovering new ways of doing things, most of which lead to increased use of the world’s resources.

The report equates the credit crunch to this new ecological crunch, and says that the main similarity is that with both finances and the earth’s resources it is not possible to live beyond our means for too long before the situation becomes critical and the world’s finances/ecology breaks down.

The report calculates the discrepancy between what we use and what the earth replenishes in terms of a cash value.

According to their calculations, the world increases its debt in financial terms by £2.5 trillion every 12 months.

That equates to 100% more than the financial losses suffered due to the credit crisis in last year.

The report, commissioned by the UN, carefully calculated these financial figures by adding together a whole range of factors including the destruction of ecosystems as well as failed crops, massive floods and so on.

The report also outlines what it calls the world’s “water footprint”.

This is divided up for every nation in the world and estimates the amount of “water stress” being suffered by each nation.

The report claims that there are 50 countries across the globe that are experiencing at least moderate or even severe water problems.

According to the report, 27 nations have to ship in over 50% of the fresh water that they use for growing crops from other regions.

One startling point is that many of these countries are not underdeveloped and the list of countries that actively “import” water includes wealthy nations such as Switzerland, Norway, Austria and the United Kingdom.

The figures they are using are already out of date, as the latest available set of data dates back to 2005.

Even so some of their findings are shocking including the fact that since 1970 the world’s biodiversity has shrunk by nearly 33%.

The number of tropical species of all creatures dropped by 50%; this figure spreads across all tropical regions.

In the period it has taken for this decline to take hold, human beings have managed to double their ecological footprint on the world.

The United Nations calculates that in just over 20 years human beings will need two earth size planets to provide for their needs.

The UN goes on to point out that these figures are not exaggerations, in fact they have gone out of their way to be conservative in their estimates.

As recently as the 60s most nations across the globe did not use more resources from the earth than can be naturally replenished.

In less than 50 years that situation has changed dramatically and within another 20 it may be impossible for us to continue to consume at the rate we are now without a total ecological credit crunch.