Britain is second biggest consumer in the world
Angela Balakrishnan
Saturday October 6, 2007
The Guardian
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Tuesday October 9 2007
We were wrong to say that a new report from the New Economics Foundation, Chinadependence, ranked Britain behind only the US as the world's biggest consumer of natural materials and goods. The report did not say this. We misunderstood a graph in the report which did not include all countries. Britain ranks 14th of the 147 countries for which data is available. In the same article we said that three more planets like Earth would be needed if the whole world consumed at the same rate as the British population. In fact 3.1 planets like Earth would be needed, or 2.1 more planets. This second error has been corrected.
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Britain ranks behind only the United States as the world's biggest consumer of natural materials and goods, according to a new report.
Despite an increasing political focus on tackling climate change and greener living, the UK is rated joint second in the table with France, a leading thinktank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), says.
It has calculated that if everyone in the world wanted to live like people in the UK, 2.1 more planets like Earth would be needed to sustain the current population. Consumption rates in the US would require five more Earths.
The NEF report is released today to mark the moment that the world starts living beyond sustainable levels this year, plunging global consumption into the red. This "ecological debt" is defined as when a country's consumption exceeds its sustainable annual resources such as food, land and ability to absorb waste to sustain a population.
Figures show that the UK is rife with ecologically wasteful international trade. Last year alone, Britain imported 14,000 tonnes of chocolate-covered waffles from all its trading partners and exported 15,000 tonnes. The UK exported 20 tonnes of mineral water to Australia, only to bring back 21 tonnes.
Andrew Simms, lead author of the report and NEF policy director, said: "Despite rising fuel prices and fears about climate change, international trade makes up a growing share of the UK's income."
Trade as a share of UK economic growth is at its highest point for over 40 years. Furthermore, Britain's increasing trade dependence has a significant impact on China in particular, NEF said.
In the past year, UK spending on imports from China jumped 18% to £15.6bn and by weight imports surged 10% to just under 6.5m tonnes. Imports of Christmas decorations in 2006 hit 60,000 tonnes.
As a result, China is rapidly becoming the "environmental laundry" for the western world, NEF said. "As China is increasingly attacked because of its rising pollution levels, people overlook two important issues," said Mr Simms. "First, per person, China's greenhouse gas emissions are a fraction of those in Europe and the United States. Second, it is demand from countries like the UK which leads to smoke from Chinese factories and power plants entering the atmosphere."
NEF added that outsourcing to China also created more harmful gas emissions for each product because China's energy is more dependent on fossils than in Europe, Japan or the USA.
Many manufacturers have chosen to relocate to China due to cheaper production costs, which makes it easier to shift the blame on rising pollution levels.
The UK's dependence on basic products such as food and energy is also soaring. Self-sufficiency for all food is now 27% lower than it was in 1990 and has dropped 7% since 2002. The ability to feed ourselves without depending on imports from overseas is at its lowest for half a century. Similarly, the UK is struggling to meet its own energy needs even though it is opting for lifestyles which require high levels of consumption. The UK lost self-sufficiency in energy production in 2004 and since then dependence has increased almost fourfold.
Mr Simms said: "We don't need to be entirely self-sufficient, but at the moment we are moving completely in the other way, which is cause for concern. It is important that we trade with responsibility."
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