Earth’s natural systems sustain all life and billions of livelihoods. Nature provides us with food, building materials, medicine, fuel, and key ecosystem services that purify water, clean the air, and regulate the climate.
Human activities are threatening natural resource availability through land use changes, hunting and harvesting of organisms, deforestation, and freshwater extraction. The sustained overuse of natural resources has caused unprecedented levels of environmental destruction, including the loss of vital ecosystems and biodiversity.
Humanity has an extensive history of unsustainable resource consumption leading to ecological overshoot. The aggregate human demands on resources, driven by per capita consumption and population growth, have exceeded the planet’s regenerative capacity since the 1970s.
>80%
Over 80% of the global population lives in countries that use more resources than what their ecosystems can renew—a discrepancy known as an “ecological deficit.”
1.7x
At a global level, we are using natural resources around 1.7 times faster than the Earth can renew them, meaning we would need almost two planets to meet humanity’s current resource demand without destroying nature.
Rich countries like the US use more than their fair share of resources — if everyone lived like the average American, we’d need five Earths!
The burning of oil, coal, and natural gas has facilitated economic development across the world, but has come with a grave cost to the environment. Fossil fuel combustion creates greenhouse gas emissions, which are driving dangerous climate change, and causes serious air pollution.
Already a quarter of the world’s population faces “extremely high water stress,” meaning they live in countries that are using at least 80% of their freshwater supply every year. An additional 1 billion people are expected to be affected by 2050. Water scarcity is driven by overextraction and increasingly, climate change.
Trees and other plants take in CO2 and release oxygen during photosynthesis, making them key actors for planetary health and climate regulation. Yet human changes to landscapes, especially deforestation, have released carbon back into the atmosphere for centuries. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the world lost around 10 million hectares (25 million acres) of forest each year between 2015 and 2020, an annual loss equivalent to the size of South Korea.
Between 2005 and 2013, cattle grazing accounted for 41% of tropical deforestation, followed by oilseeds such as from palms and soybeans at 18% (most of which are fed to livestock). In lower-income areas, small-scale subsistence farming is also an important driver of deforestation, such as in the Congo Basin, where it accounts for as much as 84% of forest disturbance.
Food production is the biggest driver of land use change, making it a leading cause of biodiversity loss. Food systems are also a major driver of climate change, contributing between a quarter to a third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
Expanding industrial agriculture—large-scale farms and livestock operations—disproportionately contributes to soil degradation, unsustainable water use, pollution, and biodiversity loss.
Overhunting and overfishing are also causing biodiversity loss and damaging ecosystems. Over a third of global fisheries are overfished, for example, meaning they will disappear without more sustainable management.
45%
The growing human population has dramatically altered Earth’s ecosystems, transforming forests, grasslands, and other wilderness areas into farms, pasture, settlements, and other built-up areas. By far the biggest driver of land use change is farming. Almost half of Earth’s habitable land is used for agriculture.
>100x
Current farming methods can degrade soil more than 100 times faster than new soil is formed. Overplowing and overgrazing cam turn fertile land into desert (a process known as desertification), which in turn increases both food insecurity and climate vulnerability.
Over 500 million people are already living in areas that have recently experienced desertification.
Livestock farming is responsible for more than half of global greenhouse gas emissions from food, and is a leading cause of deforestation, biodiversity loss, freshwater extraction, and water pollution. As the world’s population continues to grow and people become wealthier, so too will the demand for resource-intensive foods like meat and dairy.
The demand for ruminant meat (beef, lamb, and goat) is projected to increase by 88% between 2010 and 2050. This trend is not compatible with cutting agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and ending the conversion of remaining forests to farmland.
Producing beef, the most common of the ruminant meats, requires more than 20 times more land and creates more than 20 times more greenhouse gases per gram of edible protein compared to plant proteins like beans or lentils.
To stop depleting natural resources and live in harmony with the natural world, we must transform our economies, end overconsumption, and stabilize our population at a sustainable level.
Feeding our population sustainably while meeting climate targets will require massively transforming our food systems, such as by ending food waste and switching to plant-heavy diets. Ending population growth sooner rather than later will make a sustainable food future a lot more attainable.
Ending population growth requires increasing educational opportunities for girls, expanding access to quality reproductive health services, and ending harmful gender norms.
