Homo sapiens uses up one quarter of earth primary biomass production

Written by Dr. H. P. Bustami

Friday, 06 July 2007

Green plants. All animals depend on their primary production

That mankind is a threat to other species survival and the ecosystems on earth has been known since a long time. Now scientists from the austrian university of Klagenfurth, at the Institute of social ecology, published in the recent Volume of PNAS a method to calculate all factors which cause the use of primary biomass production worldwide.

An amazing amount of 24% of the primary production of all green plants (via photosynthesis ) is used by us leaving often little of food resources for other species.

Harvests, the use of wood for energy consumption and building of streets and urbanization have severe impact on nature says the study. The researchers are warning that the additional use of plant mass for bio fuel could even worsen the impact to the ecosystems. They suggest to consider their findings in future development for sustainability.

Additional impact through the use of bio fuel?

Meanwhile the use of bio fuel is rising worldwide with the beginning long term decline of oil production. The bio fuels of the first generation still need valuable food-plants to produce energy.

Now the hope is that the second generation of bio fuel will be a better solution. With this new technology even bio waste could be transformed into fuel, all organic materials containing carbon (biomass to liquid).

This then really would be a fuel deserving the name "bio".

Source:

Helmut Haberl, K. Heinz Erb, Fridolin Krausmann, Veronika Gaube, Alberte Bondeau, Christoph Plutzar, Simone Gingrich, Wolfgang Lucht, Marina Fischer-Kowalski (2007):

"Quantifying and mapping the human appropriation of net primary production in the Earth's terrestrial ecosystems"

PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

http://www.pnas.org/

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