Seeking Extra Planet Before 2050, Inquire Within

Oct. 24, 2006 — -- The natural health of planet Earth has declined by about 30 percent since 1970, according to new calculations from the World Wildlife Fund.

It's an impossible -- and dangerous -- trend, the fund's experts say.

Impossible because at current rates, humanity is using up the planet's resources so fast that by 2050 -- when the human population will have grown by an additional half to 9 billion -- we will need two Earths to meet the demand.

Dangerous because even the most essential resources -- clean water, productive land, timber and fiber products -- will be increasingly scarce, fought over by the more desperate nations, and hoarded by the more fortunate … if habits haven't changed.

"People are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste back into resources," the fund's vice president, Richard Mott, said to ABC News.

"Since the early 1980s, we've been drawing down natural capital faster than it can replenish itself," Mott said. "It now takes nature about one year and three months to replace what we use in a year."

In fact, says the fund's latest biennial "Living Planet Report," many large populations of natural food sources, including many commercial fish stocks and major swaths of the world's lumber and arable land, could simply disappear from the "irreversible damage" current usage would inflict on Earth's life systems.

In only 33 years, from 1970 to 2003, populations of 1,300 different species from fish to mammals, surveyed worldwide by the fund, had dropped by a third, with the extinction rates accelerating everywhere.

"The consequences are predictable and dire," said James Leape, director general of WWF International. "We are in serious ecological overshoot."

In 2003, the fund's experts say, people used 25 percent more resources than Earth could replenish.