| Kippreport.com

What would happen if everyone lived like the UAE?

August 14, 2012 12:25 by Eva Fernandes

It is a well known fact that the UAE has a terrifying large carbon foot print. If you have lived here for a few months then you have probably been witness to the excessive amount of plastic discarded on a daily basis, whether it is a half full bottle of water or packaging for a product. Having been around these part of the woods for some time now, Kipp isn’t too alarmed when a newbie fresh off the boat brings up their genuine disappointment over UAE’s resistance to recycling and ‘going green’. It is a bit callous and it does go against our set of values but after you hear the same thing repeated over and over again, at some point you just come to accept it as a fact. We aren’t proud of it, but we are now rather immune to those ‘shocking statistics’ about the UAE’s ever expanding carbon footprint.

 

Well, at least that is what we thought until we saw an infographic which outlined how much of land the world’s population would need to live in if everyone lived like a handful of countries. The infographic is produced by Tim De Chant from Per Square Mile, a blog about density and population matters. In order to compile this infographic, he got data from, the National Footprint Account from the Global Footprint Network-which uses peer-reviewed research by founder Mathias Wackernagel. The National Footprint Account is calculated by considering sub-footprints with regards to ‘cropland to carbon to urbanization to fishing grounds.’

 

So what did De Chant find? Well, the infographic speaks volumes so we will just get around to it, shall we? Here it is:

Rather alarming, isn’t it. As De Chant writes on his blog it is importance to consider not just the immediate physical footprint of a country but also the land requirement including the ‘farmland, transportation networks, forests and open space that recharge fresh water sources like rivers and aquifers.’ So essentially, if all 7 billion of the earth’s population lived like the way we do here in the UAE we would need a whopping 5.4 times more land than we currently have on Earth. Yikes.