Why World Ecological Debt Day and the environmental footprint are pseudoscientific nonsense

If you believe the non-profit think tank Global Footprint Network (GFN), then from August to the end of the year, humanity will consume more resources than our planet is capable of producing. GFN has been celebrating similar days periodically since 1986.



“Humanity uses nature 1.75 times faster than the ecosystem of our planet can regenerate,” this group says. “It's like claiming 1.75 Earth.”



According to the GFN, rich nations are running out of resources faster than the poor. The USA, Australia, Denmark and Canada are running out of annual resources by March, and Cuba, Nicaragua, Iraq and Ecuador only by December [Russia - by the end of April / approx. transl.].



World Ecological Debt Day , organized by this group, is based on a concept such as the Ecological Footprint used by the Wildlife Fund, the UN Environment Program, the UN Human Development Program and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.



But can the “ecological footprint” be considered a scientific concept? No you can not.



Six years ago, I helped debunk the “World Ecological Debt Day” and the calculations of the “ecological footprint” on which it is based in the work “ Are shoes sized? Real and fictional footprints ” for the scientific journal PLOS Biology, where the articles are peer-reviewed.



We looked at the six measures that make up the “ecological footprint” and found that five out of six, including food and forests, are either balanced or even add in volume. The only thing that was not balanced was the greenhouse gas emissions for which humanity is responsible.



But to solve this problem, rich countries do not need to get poorer, and poor countries do not have to remain poor - just switch to energy sources that do not emit carbon dioxide as part of “decarburization”.



And two countries, representing examples of significant decarburization, France and Sweden, are not doing this poor, but becoming richer through the use of nuclear energy. Today, France spends a little more than half of what Germany spends on electricity, which results in ten times less carbon dioxide emissions due to nuclear energy.



How did the creators of the "ecological footprint" hide their work? Claiming that to tackle climate change, it is necessary to increase forest cover, which will absorb industrial greenhouse gases.



And all this “debt” in terms of resources is due to carbon emissions, which the “footprint” transforms into the forest area needed to change the situation with emissions. Therefore, the “trace” takes readers away from all other methods of CO ₂ absorption or from ways to not throw it away at all.



Further worse. Different forests absorb carbon dioxide at different rates. However, the “ecological footprint” arbitrarily chooses a certain number, indicating the rate of its absorption for all forests around the world at any time. The “ecological footprint” method is known as “garbage in, garbage in.”



The conclusions of the “ecological footprint” are as follows: either all residents of rich and developed countries such as the USA, Europe and Australia must live like Cubans and Nicaraguans, or we must turn all the old forests of the planet into farms of young trees.



After the publication of our work in 2013, it was widely covered in the media, including magazines such as Scientific American, New Science and Le Monde, but this did not stop the European Commission and other government organizations from promoting “World Ecological Debt Day” in social networks. .



The “ecological footprint” and the “World Environmental Debt Day” were created at the same time that the European peoples and the UN adopted a neo-Malthusian approach to environmental problems.



Ironically, the UN called for the use of wood fuel instead of nuclear. In a 1987 report entitled “Our Common Future,” the UN criticized nuclear energy and insisted that poor nations use wood fuel. “Countries with wood shortages should organize their agricultural sectors so that they produce large volumes of wood and other types of vegetable fuels.”



The lead author of Our Common Future was Gro Brundland, the former prime minister of Norway, a country that had suddenly become rich just ten years before due to discovered oil and gas reserves.



People like Brundland have promoted the idea that poor countries do not need to consume a lot of energy, which turned out to be terribly wrong. Energy consumption is as closely linked to per capita GDP as it was when today's rich countries were poor.



There is no rich country that relies primarily on wood for energy, just as there is no poor country that relies primarily on fossil fuels or nuclear energy.



There is as much science in the “ecological footprint” as there is in astrology, phrenology and theories of a flat Earth. It is time to recognize the “ecological footprint” as what it is - a pseudoscientific theory.