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If India continues its current development trajectory and use of natural resources, its consumption levels would rise to the combined consumption of all the 34 OECD countries in just 14 years, a new report by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) warned on Thursday.
The warning comes ahead of the next meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), at Marrakesh, Morocco. India, at international negotiations, has called for climate justice and demanded that richer countries pay for historic damage.
This latest ‘Living Planet’ report, however, raises a red flag about future sustainability. It also says the current consumption of resources is already 70 per cent above bio-capacity.
Meanwhile, the global outlook is no better. According to the report, human actions and pressures are pushing wildlife closer to extinction. It estimates that two-thirds of the global wildlife population would be wiped out by 2020.
“For decades, scientists have been warning that human actions are pushing life toward a sixth mass extinction. Evidence in this year’s Living Planet Report supports this,” Marco Lambertini, Director General of WWF International, said in a statement.
The predictions are graver than those shown in the previous ‘Living Planet’ report, which estimated a 52 per cent dip in biodiversity by 2010. The vertebrate population has already shown a 58 per cent decline between 1970 and 2012. More specifically, there has been a massive 81 per cent dip in freshwater creature population, a 36 per cent fall in marine habitat and 38 per cent in terrestrial biodiversity.
However, despite the grim findings of the report, Lambertini struck a hopeful chord, saying, “While environmental degradation continues, there are also signs that we are beginning a transition towards an ecologically sustainable future. Despite 2016 set to be another hottest year on record, global CO2 emissions have stabilised over the last two years, with some arguing they may even have peaked.”
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