Human-made materials now outweigh Earth's entire biomass – study

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/09/human-made-materials-now-outweigh-earths-entire-biomass-study

Sandra Laville Environment correspondent
Wed 9 Dec 2020 11.00 EST

The giant human footprint stamped across the world in 2020 is greater than the impact on the planet of all other living things, research suggests.

The amount of plastic alone is greater in mass than all land animals and marine creatures combined, the study estimates.

While human beings might believe in “the immensity of the globe and the seeming infinity of the natural world”, the researchers say they wanted to provide an objective and rigorous measure of the reality of the balance between man and nature.

Their research shows that human activity including production of concrete, metal, plastic, bricks and asphalt has brought the world to a crossover point where human-made mass – driven mostly by enhanced consumption and urban development – exceeds the overall living biomass on Earth.

On average, every person in the world is responsible for the creation of human-made matter equal to more than their bodyweight each week, the paper published in Nature says.

The research found that the stamp of humanity has been increasing in size rapidly since the beginning of the 20th century, doubling every 20 years.

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The dominant categories in the analysis were human-made mass in the form of buildings and infrastructure, composed of concrete, aggregates, bricks and asphalt. As for global biomass, the majority is accounted for by plants and shrubs.

They found that at the beginning of the 20th century, the mass of human-produced objects was equal to about 3% of the world’s total biomass. But in 2020, human-made mass has reached about 1.1 teratonnes, exceeding overall global biomass.

As human-made mass has increased, so too has the impact on plant biomass. “Since the first agricultural revolution, humanity has roughly halved the mass of plants,” the authors write. “While modern agriculture utilises an increasing land area for growing crops, the total mass of domesticated crops is vastly outweighed by the loss of plant mass resulting from deforestation, forest management and other land-use changes. These trends in global biomass have affected the carbon cycle and human health.”

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