Ancestors

Written by Tanguy Fardet on 2024-04-27 at 09:59

I'm preparing a talk on resources for French civil servants (now they will have to attend one presentation on #climate, one on #biodiversity, and one on resources as part of a mandatory continuing education) and I thought I would share the images I'll be using here, as I find some of them are quite nice.

So see below for some impressive visualizations on our #resource #consumption.

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[#]dataviz #environment #resources #infrastructure #fossilFuels #metals #landUse #ecology #cattle

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Written by Tanguy Fardet on 2024-04-27 at 10:01

I guess many may have seen these two, but I had to show them: it's been a few of years since we estimate the mass of human-made stuff since 1900 has exceeded the global biomass.

That's right: the weight of all the things we made is heavier than the dry mass of all living things on the planet (including viruses).

And at the speed we're increasing it, we'll exceed the wet mass (roughly 2.5 times this) in roughly two decades; less if we keep accelerating.

Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3010-5

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Written by Tanguy Fardet on 2024-04-27 at 10:03

Of course, there are also fossil fuels!

I won't spend much time on that but it's always good to see how much one uses if they were made into big cubes.

The numbers are for US citizens, so it's probably less for most Europeans, and a lot less in other parts of the world.

For French people it's 4 times less gas (60% of the cube's size), twice less fuel (80% of the cube size), and more than 8 times less coal (so a cube half the size), but it'd still be impressive if you ask me 😉

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Written by Tanguy Fardet on 2024-04-27 at 10:18

But most of all, I'm interested in the other resources that people seldom think about: land, water, and biomass.

Land is a vital resource and we're using half of it for agriculture, with 80% to raise or feed cattle

This leaves little space for wild fauna (the bit that remains, anyways, since most mammal mass is now cattle).

https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture

And forest are not all wild areas: less than half are protected.

In France, most are fragmented, exploited and almost mono-species.

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Written by dynamic on 2024-04-27 at 11:29

@tfardet

I'm extremely surprised by the large biomass of horses.

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Written by Tanguy Fardet on 2024-04-27 at 11:37

@dynamic it was a surprise for me too, I imagine it's a bit like pets but with a much larger mass per animal? Plus maybe still used in some parts of the world?

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Toot

Written by dynamic on 2024-04-27 at 11:39

@tfardet

I guess so. I feel like when I see non-U.S. imagery of people using draft animals it's usually oxen, but I guess those would be folded in with "cattle", so these charts don't let us do that comparison.

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