What if the entire world population lived like the people in Bangladesh? The amount of land to produce the resources we’d need would take up most of Asia and some of Africa. On the other hand, if we lived like the people in the UAE we’d need 5.4 Earths to support us sustainably. That’s the result of Mathis Wackernagel’s work (Wackernagel, 2006) comparing resource availability to resource demand. Tim De Chant put this data into graphical form:
I showed this image in Environmental Science class today when we talked about ecological footprints, as well as the one showing how much space the world population of seven billion would take up if everyone lived in one big city with the same density of a few different cities (Paris, New York, Houston etc.).
Wacknagel’s original article also includes this useful table of data for different countries that I think I’ll try to get a student to put into bar graph for a project or presentation.
