Few countries provide for their people in an environmentally sustainable way.

OSU researchers have developed a system to determine how well countries around the world are at providing adequate food, energy and water to their citizens without exceeding nature’s capacity to meet those needs.

The study found that while 67 per cent of countries act safely and sustainably with regard to water use, only nine per cent do so with regard to carbon sequestration or reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

For a country to be self-sufficient, its population needs access to food, water, and energy, resources that can often only be provided by the surrounding ecosystem.

However, since human activities tend to cause undesirable side effects such as global warming or depletion of the ozone layer, it is imperative that experts look for ways to develop society in an environmentally sustainable way, said Bhavik Bakshi, co-author of the study. Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Ohio State. At the same time, to be socially just, countries need to secure resources to meet the basic needs of all their citizens.

Using recent data on water and carbon sequestration from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and other international agencies, the researchers analyzed how the needs of 178 countries around the world compare with those of their regions.

The team found that most countries emit far more carbon than their national ecosystem can handle, but tend to operate close to the limits of their water supplies.

The results showed that 37 percent of countries do not have the capacity to serve their citizens safely and fairly in terms of carbon sequestration, and 10 percent lack the capacity to do so in relation to water.

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