Ecological Footprint and Sustainable Population

With humanity currently in overshoot, societal changes must be enacted to return to sustainable levels. While either a country’s ecological footprint or population size could be altered to achieve the necessary level, combined efforts on both fronts would be most effective.

A sustainable population corresponds to the total human population that the planet can support without diminishing the health of the biosphere and its ability to support humans, in the same numbers and at the same standard of living, into the future.

Currently, at the global level, the average footprint per person is 2.8 ha/capita (global footprint of human activities divided by world population). The problem is that we only have 1.6 ha/inhabitant, which corresponds to what the planet produces in a renewable way each year, and which is called the average individual biocapacity.

The question that immediately springs to mind is: how is it possible to have a footprint (2.8 ha) greater than the Earth’s biocapacity (1.6 ha), in other words, to consume more than is produced? Well, we are quite simply drawing on the Earth’s capital: for example, we are emitting more CO2 than the oceans and forests can absorb, we are emptying the oceans of their fish, and we are sterilizing arable land by concreting it over.

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