A World of Weather: Chapter 14 Laboratory Question

Chapter 14

7. In this exercise we will attempt to quantify how much a country is degrading the environment within its own borders. We will call this measure of environmental degradation the regional environmental insult, or REI. Some of the variables that control a country's REI are its population, its land area, the way in which that land is used, and the rate at which its citizens use resources. The following relationship, suggested by Professor Arthur Few of Rice University, is but one of many possible ways to measure REI:

Regional Environmental Insult = (Population Density  x  Per Capita Resource Utilization)  
                                    --------------------------------------------------------  
                                                 Environmental Resiliency

Let's consider each quantity in turn. Population density is simply population divided by land area. A reasonable assumption is that the more densely populated a country is, the more the environment must be modified to accommodate the population. Thus, in the equation, a larger population density means a larger REI.

A country's per capita resource utilization (PCRU) is the total amount of resources used by a country, divided by its population. In a general sense, the more resources each individual citizen uses, the greater the impact on the environment, and the REI equation reflects this relationship. To estimate a country's resource utilization, we will use the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, a measure of all the goods and services produced by the workers of a nation. Then, to estimate PCRU we just divide GDP by the country's population.

To take into account a nation's ability to withstand (or even counteract) environmental degradation, we will divide by some measure of environmental resiliency. We choose the percentage of the country that is available for cultivation, or arable. This "bounce-back" factor is in the denominator of the expression, so REI decreases as the percentage of arable land increases.

The table below gives the population (in millions), land area (in km2), PCRU (in U.S. dollars), and percent arable land, for ten of the most populous countries (data is from 1992).

Country Population (millions) Land Area (km2) PCRU ($) % Arable Land
Bangladesh 119.4 133910 200 67
Brazil 158.2 8456510 2300 7
China 1169.6 9326410 280 10
India 886.4 2973190 380 55
Indonesia 184.0 1904569 330 8
Japan 124.5 374744 19000 13
Nigeria 126.3 910770 250 31
Russia 149.5 16995800 9000 10
United Kingdom 57.8 241590 15900 29
United States 254.5 9370988 22470 20
  1. Compute the REI for these ten countries.
  2. Rank the countries in order of decreasing REI. What common economic characteristic of the three countries at the top of your list makes them different from the other countries?
  3. The United States will not be at the top of your list. In fact, the U.S. should be third with an REI more than ten times smaller than the country at the top. Which of the three quantities in the REI expression is most responsible for this large difference between the REIs of the United States and the country at the top of the list?