WELCOME TO THE AL BASAMA AL BEEIYA (Ecological Footprint) INITIATIVE
Today humanity is consuming more than the Earth can produce as economies operate as if ecological resources were limitless.
Earth’s natural resources are facing immense pressures from growing populations and their exponentially increasing demands. To maintain not just the quality, but the mere sustenance of these resources for future generations, our children and our children’s children, need a better understanding of the state of these resources and the extent of the pressures put on them.
To reverse humanity’s growing pressure on the Earth, it is imperative that individuals and institutions around the world recognize the reality of ecological limits and start making decisions consistent with these limits.
The first step in this direction is to measure Earth's limits and the extent to which we are exceeding resource's usage . Just as economics use GDP as a baseline for testing models and planning for the future, environmental accounting methods such as the Ecological Footprint are needed to test the sustainability models against.
The WWF's Living Planet Report 2008 ranked UAE as the country with the world's largest Ecological Footprint per capita in 2005, which is more than three times higher than the average humanity's Footprint. However, UAE overall demand on global resources was less than half of one percent in this year