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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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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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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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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Taking a break for now but I'll resume the thread some time next week to add visualization about water and biomass 🙂
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I said I'd continue this thread ⬆️ with more data about biomass and water, but it turns out these issues are really region-specific and I don't see how to make it into a thread, so maybe I'll just write about it on my website and link it here one day.
Just to give you an idea of how much it varies, here are two neighbouring regions of France and their water use (ignoring the use to cool power plants).
Side note for France: flushes use about half as much water as industry or agriculture.
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Anyway, the numbers for France can also show that what we extract most from the environment is water, as France extracts roughly 10 Gt a year to drink, irrigate or use in the industry.
With the water used to cool power plants and fill canals, we're moving around 30 Gt of water.
So just looking at France, that's already as much as all the matter we add each year to the world's technosphere!
Cf. https://scicomm.xyz/@tfardet/112342604037828708
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@tfardet The studies at https://circabc.europa.eu/ui/group/418195ae-4919-45fa-a959-3b695c9aab28/library/c2c3ef00-75a1-46d0-8bce-ad4116236e0a also highlight how water dominates the matter used in industry. As a normal citizen with no insight into industry, this is wild.
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@darabos thanks for that link, I did not know about these EIA reports!
I'll also try make a short thread in a week or two about material consumption so we'll be able to discuss some more about this 😉
But yes, we use lots of water in lots of processes, which also means that we send quite a bit of undesirable material into water streams...
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