Jan 12, 2006, 7:40 GMT
Washington - The booming economies of China and India pose one of the world's greatest environmental challenges, the Worldwatch Institute said in its annual report Wednesday.
'Rising demand for energy, food, and raw materials by 2.5 billion Chinese and Indians is already having ripple effects worldwide,' said Christopher Flavin, president of the Washington-based environmental group.
'Meanwhile, record-shattering consumption levels in the U.S. and Europe leave little room for this projected Asian growth.'
China and India both use coal-dominated energy systems and are crucial to any efforts to slow climate change blamed on greenhouse gas emissions, the report said.
China has gone from being nearly self-sufficient in oil production in the mid-1990s to being the world's second-largest importer in 2004, the analysts said. India, meanwhile, has doubled its oil consumption since 1992.
With their use of resources and production of waste, the United States, Japan, India, China and the European Union all live well beyond their so-called ecological means, the report said. These countries claim some 75 per cent of the world's 'biocapacity', defined by Worldwatch as the total area of biologically productive land.
The squeeze on global resources already became evident in riots over rising oil prices in Indonesia and the loss of manufacturing jobs in Central America, the report claimed.
Worldwatch called for broader cooperation between China, India, Europe and the United States to improve resource efficiency and to develop new energy and agricultural systems.
China and India must be invited into important international bodies such as the G8 and the International Energy Agency, the study urged.
Currently, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions per capita are still six times the Chinese level and 20 times the Indian level. The relative efficiency of the U.S. economy allows it to produce far more economic output per unit of energy than China or India.
If China and India caught up with the U.S. per capita resource consumption and pollution emission, it would 'require two planet Earths just to sustain their two economies', the report said.
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