premise: The ecological footprint is a simple way to look at how sustainable people are being. It is based on the idea that all the resources taken from the Earth are finite. It is defined by how much land and water would be required to produce the resources that the population consumes within a year. It has been calculated that there are currently 11.2 billion bio-productive hectares available on the Earth. A study in 2004 has suggested that our ecological footprint is 13.5 billion hectares, meaning that we are using the Earths resources 20% faster than they are being renewed. This will ultimately result in the loss of all the Earths resources. Individual countries can look at their own ecological footprint and compare it to the size of their bio-productive capacity. Some countries are in an ecological deficit - they require more land than their bio-productive capacity to sustain them. Other countries have an ecological reserve, meaning that their bio-productive capacity is greater than their footprint. It can be difficult for individual countries to reduce their ecological footprint. This can either be performed by reducing that countries reliance on unsustainable resources or by increasing the amount of bio-productive land available. It is important, however, that a global effort is made to increase our sustainability.
hypothesis: Only the countries with an ecological deficit are able to tackle the global problem of sustainability.