“Climate change is just a symptom, not the main problem.”“Says Matthijs Wackernagel BBC World. It is known that in the 1990s, the Swiss engineer, in cooperation with Canadian William Rees, developed a concept Environmental footprint. He has received numerous international awards for creating a metric to measure humanity’s impact on the planet.
“The main problem is that we use too many resources compared to the size of the planet.”says the director of the Global Footprint Network, an international group of experts who create and promote sustainability tools.
Wackernagel argues that most environmental ills – from the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to deforestation and loss of biodiversity – have a root cause: the overexploitation of nature. “The central resource of the world is not rare earths, but rather the regeneration of nature because it is what produces food, wood and fibre,” he points out, adding: “Without nature nothing works.”
Human activity is increasingly threatening the planet’s ability to regenerate. But it is possible to choose a more sustainable path. Wackernagel says Uruguay has valuable lessons for the rest of the world.
Walkernagel puts forward two basic ideas: Ecological footprint and biocapacity. Ecological footprint is how much we take from nature. It is the amount of land and water needed to produce all the resources we consume. “For every orange you eat, you need land that produces that orange every year,” he explains.
On the other hand, Biocapacity is the ability of ecosystems to replenish what people demand from those surfaces.In addition to absorbing their waste. Based on these ideas, Wackernagel calculates Earth Overshoot Day each year, the date on which humanity’s annual demand on nature exceeds what the planet’s ecosystems can replenish in that year.
In other words, it is the day the planet enters an ecological deficit. this year Earth Overshoot Day occurred on July 24“This means that from January 1 to July 24, as much as the land can regenerate throughout the year was consumed,” he explains. “The world does not end on July 25, but since then we have reduced natural capital, overused resources and left an environmental debt for the future, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, fewer forests, more soil abuse, and less water in aquifers.”
Wackernagel estimates that humanity is currently using nature 1.8 times faster than Earth’s ecosystems can replenish it. That means it We use 1.8 planet Earth’s resources to live.
Overdraft day has moved forward by three months in the past two decades. But it is a process that cannot continue indefinitely. “It is not physically possible to take more and more,” Wackernagel says. “You can live in deficit until you run out of money and go bankrupt. The same thing happens with nature: the overdraft will end, there is no doubt.”
“The question is how it will end“If it’s because we’ve found ways to be sustainable, or if nature is putting pressure on us because there’s no more tree to cut down.” To show possible ways to achieve greater sustainability, Wackernagel calculated what he called “country overshoot days”: when the Earth would enter an ecological deficit if all the people on the planet lived like the population of a given country.
It should be noted that this It is different from the day when every country enters a state of deficitThat is, when a country begins to claim more than its ecosystems can replenish in that year, a measure also available on the Global Footprint Network website. Overdraft days by country, which Wackernagel calculates using about 15,000 data points from UN statistics, allows comparisons between different countries.
If everyone lived like in Qatar, for example, on February 6, we would exhaust the resources that the Earth can replenish in a year.. This Arab country is first on the list by country for 2025. On the contrary, out of more than 80 countries included in the calculation, the country with the most sustainable use of resources is Uruguay. If the world’s population lived like South America, Earth Overshoot Day would fall on December 17th.
Wackernagel explains that it does not include countries for which there is insufficient data or countries whose consumption patterns do not represent an environmental deficit due to high levels of poverty, such as Bangladesh.
It also recognizes that Uruguay It has not yet decarbonized sectors of its economy such as transportationWhich depends largely on fossil fuels. However, he says, “If everyone lived like Uruguay, the planet would enter an ecological deficit much later than it does now.”
In his opinion, “The thing that Uruguay is unique about, and something that it has done really well, is the way it has changed its electrical matrix to renewables.” The country has radically changed its electrical matrixIt moved from relying on fossil fuels by 50% in 2008 to currently relying on renewable energy by 99.1%.
How did he achieve that?
In 2008, Uruguay faced a “perfect storm” that prompted the country to look for different ways to generate electricity.. “It was a combination of several things,” particle physicist Ramon Méndez Galén, who was the architect of the energy transition as Uruguay’s national energy director between 2008 and 2015, tells BBC Mundo.
Among many other accolades, Méndez-Galen received the prestigious Climate Breakthrough Award this year for demonstrating that “small countries can lead the world on climate action while strengthening their economies and improving the lives of their people.”
Uruguay, a country with no fossil fuel reserves, was suffering from an energy supply crisis in 2008.. “We have already used our large rivers to install hydroelectric power plants,” says Méndez Galén. “We must add to this that Uruguay is very dependent on the El Niño phenomenon. Therefore, the only renewable energy we had, which was hydropower, was constantly changing from year to year, which caused us enormous problems, with an increasing need to import fuel.”
Mendez Galen explains The change in the electrical matrix was based on three main elements. The first was to reach a multilateral agreement in 2010 for an energy transition towards domestic and renewable sources. “An agreement between all political parties in the country on the direction we are going in the next 25 years has been absolutely central to this process,” he says. “We have already had five successive governments following the same policy.”
The second element was building governance under strong state leadership, but under a partnership between the public and private sectors.. “Uruguay has a public electricity distribution company, UTE, but the bulk of the investment came from the private sector. It was close to $6 billion, 12% of Uruguay’s GDP at the time, which is very high for a country with such a small economy,” he says.
For example, private parties have invested in wind farms, but under the rules of the game set by the government. Private companies were forced to sell electricity to the state company UTE. “The public company pledged to buy all the electrical energy produced for 20 years.” The third element is reducing fossil fuel subsidies.
“All the world’s energy systems have a strong bias towards the continuity of fossil energies.”He asserts that this “prevents renewable sources from being able to win competitively.” “So what we did was a deep review of the entire regulatory framework and the design of the entire market to adapt it to the characteristics of renewable sources.”
Electricity is currently generated through a combination of hydropower (about 45%), wind (about a third), biomass combustion, and solar energy. The rest is generated by thermal power plants powered by fossil fuels, the use of which increases when the climate impacts renewable sources, such as in droughts.
This shift has had multiple benefits, says Méndez Galén. “Electricity generation costs have been cut in half, from about $1.1 billion average cost per year to about $600 million.” User rates decreased by 20%.
“Not everything is taken at interest rates because the Uruguayan public company is a source of income for the Uruguayan state, which Uses profits to benefit other public policies In the sectors of education, development, health, etc. The energy transition has also created 50,000 jobs, and Uruguay now exports electricity.
“UTE Electricity Company is today the main exporter of goods and products for the entire country and this brings in foreign exchange. We have reached up to 450 million US dollars in foreign exchange obtained by exporting energy surpluses.” The new matrix also allowed prices to stabilize And make electricity generation safe from geopolitical events such as the war in Ukraine.
Following Uruguay’s success, Méndez Galén founded Ivy, an organization that supports countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in their climate and energy transitions. In his opinion, Uruguay’s transformation model “can be replicated in any country in the world, regardless of its characteristics”.
Wackernagel points out that the case of Uruguay is of particular importance in confronting the new global reality. “We are in a new world where the limiting factor is physical resources and the mother of all resources is biological capacity.”
He adds that even fossil energy, And it’s not just the sediments, but the biosphere’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases.. “We can absorb more carbon dioxide by planting more trees, but we will have less space for food. It is competition for productive land,” the expert explains.
He asserts that in this new world, “South America is rich.” It has many environmental resources relative to its populationIf we compare it to the rest of the world. However, compensation for biocapacity is not yet sufficient due to a “major market failure”: “What we need to ask ourselves is how much higher resource prices need to be for demand to reach a level that is sustainable for our planet.”
For Wackernagel, The future has never been more predictable: “We know that we will face climate change and increasingly scarce resources.” However, humanity continues to run a “pyramid scheme using the planet’s resources”, paying for the present with the future. “The engine of the economy needs food to move, which are resources, and we increasingly need more and use the resources of the future to move the engine of the present.”
For the expert, we should not expect that solutions to challenges such as climate change or overexploitation of nature will necessarily come from global agreements, but rather from local solutions such as Uruguay’s. “We don’t have a common problem. We are in a common context and it depends on how each country prepares for the future.“The future will be renewable or it will not be,” concludes Wackernagel.
*Written by Alejandra Martinez