Context: As per a new study, some 5.4 billion people or 72% of the world’s population were unable to sustainably obtain necessary ecological resources in 2017.
Key highlights

• These people lived in countries with low biocapacity and below average incomes.
• ‘Biocapacity’ is the ability of an ecosystem to regenerate the resources that people use.
• The countries were classified into four categories based on their gross domestic product per capita and ecological deficit between 1980 and 2017.
• In 1980, 57% of the world’s population lived in low biocapacity and below average incomes. The worldwide ecological deficit was only 19%.
• In 2017, 72% people lived in low biocapacity and below-average income. The global ecological deficit rose to 73%.
• Wealthier countries used approximately 52% of the planets’ biocapacity.

About Bio capacity
The biocapacity or biological capacity of an ecosystem is an estimate of its:

• Production of certain biological materials such as natural resources
• Absorption and filtering of other materials such as carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

It is expressed in terms of global hectares per person, thus is dependent on human population.

• A global hectare represents the average biological productivity of all productive hectares on Earth in a given year (because not all hectares produce the same amount of ecosystem services).
• Biocapacity is used together with Ecological Footprint as a method of measuring Human impact on the environment.