If every person on the planet consumed resources like a New Zealander, two Earths would be needed to sustain the global population.
If every person on the planet consumed resources like a New Zealander, two Earths would be needed to sustain the global population.
That's one of the findings of the New Zealand Footprint Project - which surveyed five communities looking at the way they live, what they consume and what they can do to reduce their impact on the planet.
The communities were in Waitakere and Waiheke Island in Auckland, Kapiti Coast in the Wellington region and Cromwell and Tarras in Central Otago.
The community with the biggest footprint was Tarras - the most rural of those surveyed.
One of the authors, Dr Maggie Lawton, said Tarras has high travel, housing and household energy footprints.
Anything that was a pet was considered to be part of the family footprint - and in Tarras that included horses as well as dogs, which required a lot of food.
"And people in rural communities if they had the money to do so often took quite extensive overseas holidays."
Ms Lawton said one of options discussed for reducing the Tarras community's footprint was an online car -pooling system.
