Ecco Ecological Footprint: Il progetto SVE di Giacomo in Romania
Questo testo è stato scritto da una volontario italiano presso l’associazione rumena Gaia, partner sve di Scambieuropei
Today, the 8th of August 2016, is the the Earth overshoot day!! It is the day we have used as much from nature as our planet can renew in the whole year!!
What?? Of course it is not a day to celebrate, just to keep in mind.
It’s a nice day and you decide to buy some fruit from the store!! You are right in front of the fruit box and you want to take some apples… you can take …how many?? whatever you want…even if you don’t need.
Now consider this, you come back home, open your bag and figure out that you’ve bought 2 Kg of apples. After this we need to replace the verb “eat” with the verb “consume” to make the scene more interesting!!
How much apples can you consume?
Not more than 2 Kg!! Do you agree?
All this means if you finish that 2 Kg and you want more you need to come back again to the market, so you need a permanent storage from where you can take apples but unforunately nature doesn’t work like that!!
Starting from this example I’d like to introduce the concept of Ecological Footprint.
We can consider the previous concept as the same for ecological systems. So we have someone who is gonna provide all what someone else needs and consume. We need to go a little more deep into ecology but, don’t worry, not that much!!
Rules of nature lead the ecological systems in the same way they should lead our lifes just because we are part of the same systems.
The game runs with two teams: the first one is composed by resources (food, sun light, water, energy, petrol, rare metals for phones and laptop and any kind of substances that could be consider “edible” or just essential for some living being) and the second one by living beings (plants, animals, bacteria, humans, etc…) that are consuming these resources.
Who is gonna take more than the other?
This type of resources could be devided in renewable or not renewable and this depend on the time they will take to become useful and available again after they have been consumed.
Animal and trees are actually consuming just the resources they need to stay alive and they have been doing this since they are on the Planet Earth!!
Exactly!!..Human beings are the ones that consume more than they need. As well as the world population is in constant growth the global consumption is increasing too.
This phenomenon increase as time goes on so we need to take into account how much we are consuming and make this quantity countable. It has been decided to assume Global Hectare (gha) as unit of measure. This is used both to calculate:
1-the terrestrial area required to supply the humans needs (Demand).
2- the terrestrial area capable to provide needed resources (Biocapacity).
In fact, to get the final estimation of the Ecological Footprint we need to sottract the Demand from the Biocapacity and, to be honest, use a specific factor but it is actually a little bit out of our line.
Scientist of Global Footprint Network are investigating on it in order to understand the humanity demand on nature. In terms of number it is how much of the resources we are taking off from the planet.
Based on this each country has a specific value of Ecological Footprint and it is easy to understand that the most developed countries are the ones who consume more than they need. The Ecological Footprint of those countries is ten times bigger than the poorest ones.
This is not so equal as it should be!!.
More than this is has been shown that we are actually demanding more than the biocapacity.. our request in terms of resources is equal the resouces produced by 1.6 Planet Earth!!
But unfortunately we have just one and it is so kind and beautiful that it would be better to keep it and make it last as long as possible!!
Today is the day to remind you that starting from now we ll deplete our future resources until there won’t be anymore. In theory we should quit consumption today..who ll be the first in line??
Scritto da: Giacomo Conti
Tratto da: http://gaiacraiovacommuni.