COP16: the co-creator of the Ecological Footprint is in Cali; 'if the world continues to deplete resources, we will need 3 planets by 2050'

A few metres from the Cali River, which reaches the city choked with pollutants as it descends from the Farallones Mountains, leaving more stones than water in its wake, Swiss engineer Mathis Wackernagel is optimistic.

(Lea esta historia en español, aquí)

The co-creator of the ecological footprint, one of the theories used worldwide for more than 30 years to measure the impact of human consumption and demand on ecological goods and resources, keeps looking at the river. "It's better than what I saw two days ago," he says, then asks about the iconic church of La Ermita, the image of postcards that roll around the world in the hands of tourists like engineer Wackernagel.

The 62-year-old researcher had never been to Cali before and arrived for the first time last week as the city became busier than ever to host COP16, with some 18,000 people from delegations from 196 countries. The main purpose is not just to deliver a message about a sustainable planet without depleting its resources. The analyst and researcher was decorated by the Congress of the Republic, in the day of "Congress to the street", which was held in Cali, on 24 October, in the hemicycle of the Council of the capital of Valle del Cauca.

Cali is excited, and no less for it, because it has come out massively, more than during some of its Christmas fairs, to appropriate the Paseo Bolivar, the Boulevard of the River and around La Ermita, all together forming the Green Zone of citizen participation in the most important summit in the world, where at the end of this week decisions are expected on the future of biodiversity to ensure the survival of humanity.

While the heads of state met to negotiate in the Valle del Pacífico Events Centre, on the road from Cali to Yumbo, local and foreign citizens took over the Green Zone as a free space to learn and become aware of the importance of caring for the environment.

On the Ortiz Bridge, the Swiss researcher affirms that all the world's inhabitants are "overstretching" the planet, in other words, using more than there is.

Wackernagel says that he and William Rees proposed the Ecological Footprint in the 1990s to measure how human society as a whole is demanding more than 75% - not even more than 100% - of what the planet can give, so resources are running out and people are looking elsewhere for more, while the atmosphere is accumulating more carbon dioxide.

But Wackernagel reiterates that the Footprint was designed to give the world knowledge, context and from there real change, not from a vision of doom without action to avoid it, but to see this moment of ecological debt as an opportunity.

He explains: "Humans use the equivalent of 1.7 planets of the Earth, when to live stably that number should be 0.5," says the sustainable development advocate. Looking at how the world has evolved from the 1960s to 2024, after the ecological footprint warning of the early 1990s, the Swiss researcher says that consumption has doubled. The worrying thing is that the prediction he made in his last interview with EL TIEMPO 13 years ago, during another visit to the country, is still valid: if the world continues on its current course, we will need two planets by 2030 and three by 2050.

He also mentions another concept: the Earth's biocapacity, the ability of ecosystems to regenerate biomass.

"We cannot live without food, and we cannot eat without biocapacity. Electronic infrastructure needs energy, which depends on biocapacity," he says. When he talks about biocapacity, he is referring to the ability of ecosystems to regenerate biomass, to rebuild and to heal. This biocapacity is about 1.6 hectares per person. But the warning comes back, as it did more than 30 years ago with researcher Rees: in two decades of the planet's history, humans have burned 45% of fossil energy.

And what is the first thing that society must do, Wackernagel asks: understand, recognise the existence of a problem, but "resources are running out and for people that is normal" and it should not be, he insists, to continue walking along the River Boulevard. He explains that the disproportionate use of resources to generate money can no longer be justified.

The problem, he says, is that the population sees development in of money and attaches value only to this economic growth, whereas the value should be in the ability to live, to get food from the land. Wealth has nothing to do with having more purchasing power, but with using the planet's resources without consuming them in order to generate income, because capital is the resources present in forests, cultivated land or those offered by the oceans. But if this capital is consumed in its entirety, without understanding the consequences, there will be more poverty in the world. And this new question remains: "How can we have more money when resources are running out?

Wackernagel, who has worked with governments, private companies and NGOs on sustainability issues on every continent, continues his walk, this time along the Bolivar Promenade, amidst the crowds of visitors to the Green Zone. He says there is a failure in the market, which is being over-exploited by the desire to accumulate more at the expense of natural resources that do not meet people's needs.

The world is overstretched, with resource use exceeding consumption on 1 August this year. Every year, the Global Footprint Network, chaired by researcher Wackernagel, calculates Earth Overshoot Day, but it all depends on the rate of consumption of ecological resources. It is also different in each country because of its own social dynamics.

While some people, such as a family, ask to be photographed with the sustainability advocate, he says all is not lost. He is optimistic, as he was when he looked at the Cali River. He says that if action is taken now, if people have confidence in themselves and if there is a consensus among nations, this overshoot can be reversed.

He asserts that there is hope for Colombia, for example, because it is a rich country and its capacity to regenerate ecological resources is above the global rate.

He reiterates that being in overshoot with the Earth is not bad news, "we have to think of opportunities".

The analyst and advocate of a sustainable planet without extinction says that he has been interested in the environment since he was a child growing up in a country that was not involved in the Second World War, but which, as a neighbour of those who were, imposed food rationing for a whole year. It was then that he began to wonder why there was so much financial wealth and so few environmental resources.

As in his childhood, he was concerned about the peasants. He agreed with the indigenous people and the peasants in the countryside that they worked from sunrise to sunset, sowing and harvesting, that they were the larder of society, but that they did not receive enough reward from the cities. In fact, he was surprised to find that this was a situation that existed in his native Switzerland more than half a century ago, and that it was very similar to what communities in Colombia and Latin America are facing today.

The Ecological Footprint is "an aggregate measure that represents the amount of biologically productive area required to provide the resources consumed and assimilate the waste generated by an entity. In other words, it measures the pressure that a given population places on nature".

As for the calculation of Earth Overshoot Day, it is obtained by "dividing the planet's biocapacity (the amount of ecological resources the Earth can produce in a given year) by humanity's ecological footprint (humanity's demand for that year) and multiplying by the number of days in a year". This means that the rest of the year corresponds to global overshoot.

CAROLINA BOHÓRQUEZ

Correspondent of EL TIEMPO

Cali