Africa is Fast Running Down Resources

The warning was issued in its first-ever detailed report on Africa’s ecological footprint - an estimate of the area of a country or region’s land and sea surface used annually in meeting the individual consumption demands of its people.

"A growing number of African countries are depleting their natural resources - or will shortly be doing so - faster than they can be replaced," said WWF President, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, in presenting the findings to a Johannesburg conference.

The report put Egypt, Libya and Algeria at the head of a list of nations of the continent already living well beyond their ecological means.

Were also using up

But nine others were also using up their bio-capacity - Morocco, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

The Swiss-based WWF, previously known as the World Wide Fund for Nature but now identified only by the initials and its panda logo, issued the report, "Africa-Ecological Footprint and Human Well-being" together with a US-based research body, the Global Footprint Network.

It said that despite over-consumption of resources in some countries, Africa’s overall ecological footprint at 1.1 hectares of land and sea - still behind the continent’s total biocapacity of 1.3 hectares per head of population.

And the African figures are still well below the global average footprint of 2.2 hectares per person which, with 1.8 hectares available, is running at a rate suggesting humanity will need two planets by 2050.

But the big danger for the continent is that its current population of some 680 million is growing rapidly and is predicted to double, meaning Africa will account for nearly a quarter of the world’s people by 2050.

Although development is vital for Africans, at the lower end of the United Nations’ human welfare index, they have to "work with, rather than against, ecological budget constraints," said Global Footprint Network director Mathis Wackernagel.

Meanwhile, Japan will start a trial system for carbon trade this year, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said on Monday, unveiling a climate change policy that set a goal for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, but stopped short of what environmentalists say is key.

Japan will aim to cut its emissions by 60-80 percent by 2050 and announce an interim target sometime next year, Fukuda said in a speech one month before hosting a G8 summit, where global warming is high on the agenda.