There is hope

When researchers started looking at whether countries could expand their populations and economies without using up more of the Earth's limited natural resources, they expected the answer to be “no”. But their findings suggest it can be done. A set of maps released this week show that people’s impact on the environment has been rising at a rate slower than that of economic and population growth. 

While the world's population grew 23 percent and its economy 153 percent between 1993 and 2009, the global footprint of humans grew only 9 percent, calculated a team of researchers from the University of Northern British Columbia, the University of Queensland, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and six other universities.

Oscar Venter of the University of Northern British Columbia, the lead author of the study published in Nature Communications, called the results "encouraging...It means we are becoming more efficient in how we use natural resources," he said. 

http://news.trust.org/item/20160824145746-t3iay