Africa set to exceed biocapacity?

[GliderGuider]

Factbook Charts Africa’s Footprint, Human Development Trends

If current population and consumption trends continue, Africa’s Ecological Footprint will exceed its biocapacity within the next twenty years, while a number of countries, including Senegal, Kenya and Tanzania, are set to reach that threshold in less than five years, according to a report issued today by Global Footprint Network and key partners.

The Africa Factbook 2009 reveals that while Africa’s population grew from 287 million to 902 million people between 1961 and 2005, the amount of biocapacity (food, fiber and timber resources that are renewably available) per person decreased by 67 percent during this same time period.

Though this is reflective of a global trend, it is particularly alarming for Africa, whose countries contain 12 percent of the world biocapacity, and whose population often suffers first and most tragically when humanity’s demand on nature exceeds what nature can renewably provide. As the world’s nations continue to deplete their own resources, demand on Africa’s raw materials continues to grow. Population growth and the impacts of climate change on crop production are exacerbating these pressures.

[pscot]

1. This sounds like a real conversation starter

:popcorn:

[Nihil]

2. Bah humbug!

"Malthus disproved!"

"Green Revolution!"

"Technological Solutions!"

"Human Ingenuity!"

"Fairy Dust!"

"All Live Happily Ever After!"

(Just thought I'd simplify their response :hi: )

[Dead_Parrot]

3. Too long

Technofairy greenenuity antiMalever!

[phantom power]

4. I think I'm going to hurl.

[HamdenRice]

5. Uh, no. Proving on a daily basis why Malthusians should not be allowed to play with statistics

These charts are pretty silly.

Let's take the bottom one first, and examine it by thinking through a hypothetical thought experiment. Let's assume this were a chart of a country or region with plentiful resources and a small number of people, but whose population had grown in exactly the proportion that Africa's had over the years covered. What would the chart look like? Exactly the same.

That's because all it's doing is saying there was X amount of landed resources in 1960 and Y number of people of people in 1960 and there are 3Y number of people today. So the X/Y is now X/3Y today or 1/3. The population tripled, so the amount of resources per person was cut in third, regardless of whether the 1/3 per person is sufficient to support the population. It's a spectacularly silly example of bad statistics.

In fact, the chart actually reflects development, and the elasticity of terms like "crop land." Notice that the population tripled, but the amount of crop land divided by three times as many people was only half. This is reflected in the historical data of what has actually happened on the ground. This means land was diverted from other uses to crop land. It may also suggest increased capacity for food production compared to what would have happened if the amount of crop land was static, although that's impossible to know from this chart without more data about the quality of the additional crop land created.

The decrease in grazing land could be related to many different factors, including the conversion of grazing to crop land (a net increase in land productivity), but more likely influenced by the desertification of the Sahel. In other words, the decrease in grazing takes no account of the productivity of that grazing, equating, say, a one camel per square mile grazing area in Mali to highly productive low veld grazing in Mozambique. Because of the radical variability of the productivity of grazing land, real working agricultural statisticians calculate grazing in terms of animal units (a way of equating land that supports different numbers of animals), rather than hectares.

I suppose when the pressure on existing crop and grazing land becomes severe, the Rhode Island sized game parks scattered around Africa could be opened to human settlement, but most African governments have committed to sustainable development within existing settlement areas while preserving the most extensive wild areas on the planet for the development of tourism and the maintenance of global biodiversity.

The first chart then takes the flawed output from the second chart -- the arbitrary "biocapacity per person" and plots it against an equally flawed statistical concept, the "footprint" of African consumers. Supposedly, this shows that the capacity per person is approaching the required resources per person, but the caveat is that they have calculated the footprint based on "sustainable" use.

By that measure, everyone in Europe and North America is already dead because the Malthusians have already concluded our western agriculture is unsustainable.

In other words, Africa is one of the few places where the overwhelming majority of agriculture activity is "resource based" -- ie there are few inputs besides the natural fertility of the land and natural rainfall. There is almost no irrigation outside South Africa and Egypt. The green revolution has not been adapted as vigorously as in Asia. Fertilizer is not widely used because extensive crop rotations are still possible to manage soil fertility.

So what this first chart is saying is that some time in the future, market forces are likely to incentivize African farmers to switch from forest fallows of up to 7 years, to the application of fertilizer, like the rest of the world, which would lower the amount of land needed per person to produce a crop.

Heaven forbid!!! African agriculture MUST NOT DEVELOP!!11!

Drop the keyboard and step back from the spread sheet before you hurt yourself!

Anyone who has traveled in Africa and Asia and compared the two would see how preposterous this article is.


(Edited for clarity)

[GliderGuider]

6. The issue is not just food production.

One of the things that puts Africa closer to the edge in this assessment is that some of the biologically productive land is set aside for carbon absorption. Here is a quote from the full Africa Factbook PDF:

The Ecological Footprint measures humanity’s demand on the biosphere by accounting for the area of biologically productive land and sea required to provide the resources we use and to absorb our waste. This area includes the cropland, grazing land, forest and fishing grounds required to produce the food, fiber, and timber consumed by humanity, and the productive land on which we build infrastructure. It also includes the area needed to absorb and store humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions, which come from burning fossil fuels, landuse changes such as conversion of forest to cropland, chemical processes in cement production and from flaring of natural gas. The carbon component of the Ecological Footprint is calculated in terms of the forest area required to absorb these emissions. The Footprint can be directly compared to the amount of productive area, or biocapacity, that is available. Because the amount of biocapacity on the planet is finite, the various ecological services that humanity uses compete for productive area.

The globalized economies of today bring African goods to consumers far away, and products from around the world to Africa. The Ecological Footprint takes trade into account by summing all the biocapacity a population demands regardless of where that biocapacity is located on the planet. In other words, resources (including those embedded in products) that are exported to consumers abroad are reflected in the Footprint of the consuming rather than the producing country.

According to this measure, Business As Usual is not sustainable world-wide, because the planet no longer has the biocapacity to both provide our food and absorb our waste over the long term. That means that BAU must eventually give way to something more sustainable. Whether that involves different food production techniques, new energy technologies that produce less carbon, lower levels of human activity or some combination of any or all three remains to be seen.

[HamdenRice]

12. So Africa is running out of biocapacity because Europe and America need it for carbon sump?

Why isn't the headline then that Europe and America are running out of biocapacity?

Bottom line: The OP article is alarmist crap trucking in false stereotypes of African natural resource poverty.

The charts say nothing of carbon absorption, but make a simple minded case that because the population has increased, the continent is running out of biocapacity, even though these same "experts" would not make the same arguments about much more densely populated areas of Asia and Europe and North America.

[GliderGuider]

14. I don't think you understand the concept of the ecological footprint.

The EF doesn't measure the impact of American consumption on African biocapacity. It measures the impact of a region's consumption on that same region's biocapacity. By that measure, the USA is in much, much worse shape than Africa, with an EF of 9.6 gha and a biocapacity of only 4.7 (as of 2003). Perhaps a better title would have been, "Even Africa is set to exceed its biocapacity." After all, at least Africa still has spare biocapacity, while the world as a whole has long since run out (given a global overshoot of ~40% according to the Footprint of Nations report PDF).

[HamdenRice]

15. For once, I wholeheartedly agree (not about not understanding footprint)

"Even Africa is set to exceed its biocapacity" is a much better description of the situation and article.

The problem is that Africa certainly has tremendous environmental and development challenges; but it also is the most promising because it may be the only place where humans continue to coexist with massive populations of mega fauna and vast wild places while meeting human needs.

Unfortunately, this kind of "study" as well as the persistent misrepresentations of the challenges and situation in the "starving Africa" pity fests in TV make us misplace where our efforts should be directed.

[GliderGuider]

16. The USA probably exceeded its biocapacity in 1950.

Given that the nation is in 100% overshoot today, it probably reached capacity with half its current population in about 1950. This is a crude estimate, but per capita consumption has increased, while the total amount of biocapacity has dropped due to continuing deforestation and the growth of cities.

The USA has been living on ecological credit extended by the rest of the world for the last half century. Unfortunately, ecological loans are very hard to pay back.

[excess_3]

13. so you expect the US to pay Africa not to cut down their forests? .nt

[Terry in Austin]

7. Who are Malthusians?

And where the heck is Malthusia, anyway?


B-)

[XemaSab]

8. It's one of the Mascarene Islands

[GliderGuider]

9. I hear their food really sucks.

:shrug:

[XemaSab]

10. That's funny, I heard squab is a traditional delicacy there

:shrug:

[GliderGuider]

11. As a Malthusian myself, I LOVE squab.

Actually I've only had it once, but it was delicious. Then on my way out of the restaurant I noticed that their street corner was the only one with no pigeons...