The ecological footprint is a way to measure how much pressure humans put on the natural world. It is all the productive land and water a population needs to produce the food, goods, and energy it consumes, and the space required to absorb its waste, especially carbon emissions.
An equally important metric is biocapacity, which represents nature's ability to regenerate these resources. Scientists measure this in global hectares to allow for fair comparisons between different regions. When a country's footprint is larger than its biocapacity, it is running an ecological deficit.
This gallery ranks the top 30 nations by their total impact, showing who is using the most of Earth's biological budget. Curious? Click to find out.