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UAE's eco footprint highest in the world

ABU DHABI — It may seem startling but an average person in the UAE may be contributing to consumption of more than six Earth planets every year! That's if this average person lives in a medium size apartment, drives a family car for up to 100 miles every day, and has a diet, half of which comprises imported products. And, like this person, everyone elsewhere on the planet is doing the same, i.e, living the same lifestyle!

According to the 2006 Living Planet Report, UAE was ranked as the country with the highest ecological footprint, using 11.8 global hectares per person (a global hectare has world-average ability to produce resources and absorb waste).

While this finding raised fundamental questions about people's life-style in the UAE, the government gave its go-ahead to a study of the country's ecological footprint. A team, led by the Emirates Wildlife Society–World Wildlife Fund (EWS-WWF), started collecting data in October 2007 and the plan is to have it done by the end of June this year so the findings are published in 2008 Living Planet Report, due in October.

"We have collected data from the private, public and governmental sources around the country, focusing on the UAE's population and carbon dioxide emissions," said Razan Al Mubarak, Managing Director of EWS-WWF.

In the future phases of the ecological footprint database, research will also extend to other parameters such as urban development, also considered to have a major impact on the environment here.

Alessandro Galli, a consultant for the Environment Agency–Abu Dhabi and a footprint expert, explained that the ecological footprint is an environmental accounting tool to measure one aspect of sustainability. "It measures how fast we consume resources and generate waste, compared to how fast nature can absorb our waste and generate new resources," said Galli.

The bad news is that since the 1980s, people have been consuming more than what the Earth can produce.