Our increasing use of biomass could mean trouble for our planet

According to research released by NASA, humans are using more and more plant life for “food, fiber, building and packaging materials and biofuels.”  That increase is happening not just overall as the world population increases but also per person.

According to satellite data, our consumption of the Earth’s total land plant production in 1995 was 20 percent.  By 2005, that percentage had jumped to 25 percent.  There are two factors that are leading the trend upwards.  The first is ever increasing population.  The higher the global population, the more plant production is consumed.  The second is that in areas like North America and China not only is the population increasing but so is the per person consumption of such things as food, paper, and wood.

Marc Imhoff at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md has asked “The question is, ‘How hard are we pushing the land? People are wary about that percentage creeping up. Most people consider that a high number, although we’re still doing research.”

An illustrative example of the impact of population growth combined with increased personal consumption habits: If, in several decades, each person on the planet consumes at the current rates of North Americans, we will require more than 50 percent of Earth’s plant production each year, Imhoff said.

That means that more land will need to be managed very carefully.  With the increase of managed land will come the decrease of wilderness and biodiversity.

And as the population grows and becomes more dependent on those managed systems and a long-range food and product distribution network, many populations would become more at risk to perturbations to those systems, such as drought. Already, some densely populated urban areas consume more than 30,000 times the nearby regional plant production.

Of course all plant production varies from year to year depending on weather conditions.  Droughts, freezes, fires, too much or too little rain, floods, and other unmanageable conditions occur in different parts of the earth each year creating havoc in food supplies without factoring in increased consumption.

Although these trends sound ominous, it is still unclear what kind of impact this growing amount of consumption will have.  Changes in farming practices or genetic modification of plants may improve the hardiness and amount of food grown.  Better land management could also improve the situation.

There is more research to be done and analysis to be made before anyone claims that we have reached a crisis, but it should be noted that our trend towards greater consumption is putting increasing stress on our planet.

A video of Professor Imhoff discussing the research and its implications can be found here.

The above global map shows total consumption by region of photosynthetic plant material as a percentage of the plant material grown by region. Scientists call the plant “supply” net primary production, or NPP, and refer to the “demand” as Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP). (Credit: Trent Schindler, Scientific Visualization Studio, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center).

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