Page "Steady state economy" Paragraph 8

Additional studies and analytical tools corroborate much of the Club of Rome's work.

For example, the ecological footprint is a measure of how much land and water area a human population requires to produce the resource it consumes and to absorb its wastes, using prevailing technology.

The Global Footprint Network calculates the world's ecological footprint to be the equivalent of 1. 5 planets ( as of 2009 ), meaning that human economies are consuming 50 % more resources than the Earth can regenerate each year.

In other words, it takes one year and six months to regenerate what we consume in a year.

This sort of ecological accounting suggests that economic growth is depleting resources at a rate that cannot be maintained.