Hand holding a seedling / moss, East Kalimantan, Borneo
© Simon Rawles / WWF-Canon
If every person in the world lived as we do in Australia we’d need more than one planet to support us – which obviously, we don’t have. We’d actually need more than 3 planet Earths. Australians consume more of just about everything, per person, than people in other countries. We consume too much food, too much paper, timber, metals, too much energy, water, plastic, glass – you name it, as a nation we consume a lot of it.
Over consumption is a significant contributor to global warming and climate change and this consumption is the major cause of Australia’s large footprint. Our way of life in Australia is threatening the future of our planet.
We at WWF do our best to conserve and protect the environment – through on the ground conservation work and also by working with government and business industries, that can have the biggest impact, to make the big changes we need to become a sustainable country and economy.
But we all have to do our part, as we have all contributed to the state of our planet and to global warming. We need to change the way we live and reduce our over-consuming lifestyles to get back to a place and time where people and nature lived in harmony and each country lived within their means and the Earth’s natural resources.
This section provides you with the tools needed to make the change to a sustainable lifestyle. There are simple choices and changes we can make in our daily lives that will help us live more sustainably. Once each Australian makes this decision for themself, that they want a natural environment for future generations, it will help send a clear signal to government and industry that there is a demand and a need for change.
