arab environment: survival options
options as a bloc? Beyond questions of political economy, what ethical values are needed to govern thinking about consumption and lifestyle? Addressing these questions requires going beyond traditional economic thinking. Making more effective policy decisions demands a shift in the accounting of national ecological endowments. Therefore it is necessary to incorporate ecological accounting in economic policy formulation. In other words, policy makers and leaders in Arab countries will need to look beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the cornerstone measure of performance, and seek to complement traditional economic analysis with information on renewable resource consumption and availability. In this new era of economic insecurity, tracking the demand for natural capital is essential to meeting the basic needs of food and water security, and ultimately to ensuring economic competitiveness while strengthening ecological health. As a basis for this analysis, AFED has cooperated with the Global Footprint Network (GFN) to produce an Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Atlas, exploring ecological constraints in Arab countries. The system of ecological footprint accounting, developed by GFN, measures human demand on nature. It does so by linking all human demand for food, fiber, urban space, and waste absorption -- such as CO2 -- to biologically productive areas needed to provide these services. This demand is people’s ecological footprint. Ecological accounting also tracks how much of this productive area is available in the world or in a particular country. By keeping books of demand for and supply of nature, this accounting system provides an ecological balance statement, evaluating the endowment of ecological services compared to what people consume. Both footprint and biocapacity are expressed in global hectares (gha). By standardizing hectares and scaling them proportionally to the regenerative capacity on that hectare, this unit allows analysts to compare demand and supply across the world. Based on this accounting methodology, the Arab Atlas documents trends over the period from 1961 to 2008, the last year data is available. It covers the 22 members of the League of Arab States as individual countries, sub-regions, and as a whole region. At a glance, the Atlas shows rapidly developing constraints in natural capital: All countries of the region exhibit vast ecological deficits today, except for Sudan and Mauritania, although the region as a whole was an ecological creditor in 1961, as illustrated in Figure 1. The Atlas reveals figures that are critical for understanding the region’s competitive advantages and disadvantages, among which are: •
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Since 1979 the region as a whole has been experiencing a biocapacity deficit, with its demand for ecological services exceeding local supply by more than double. In order to bridge this gap, ecological services have had to be imported from outside the region. The average resident in Arab countries demands more than twice what is available locally. The average ecological footprint per capita in Arab countries increased by 78 percent from 1.2 to 2.1 global hectares per capita over the past 50 years. The available average biocapacity per capita in Arab countries decreased by 60 percent over the time period 1961-2008. Population has increased by 250 percent over the same time period; the
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