"We are spending nature's capital faster than it can regenerate," WWF's Director General Claude Martin said.

"We are running up an ecological debt which we won't be able to pay off unless governments restore the balance between our consumption of natural resources and the earth's ability to renew them," he added.

The balance sheet of the world's environment, published every other year, showed a continuing growth in demand on the earth's capacity to clean air, provide food, energy and raw materials.

Each person occupies an "ecological footprint" equivalent to 2.2 hectares (5.4 acres) in terms of their capacity to pollute or consume energy and other resources including food, while the planet can only offer them 1.8 hectares each, the 2004 report said.

"That means we are eating into the biological capital of our only planet," Martin told journalists.

WWF said it was particularly alarmed at the continuing growth in the use of polluting fossil fuels -- oil, gas and coal -- for industrial and personal consumption, which increased by 700 percent between 1961 and 2000.

The country with the largest overall footprint in 2001 was the United Arab Emirates, with just below ten hectares per person, mainly due to energy consumption that accounted for more than 70 percent of the size.

It was followed by the United States and Kuwait, with scores above nine hectares. The Gulf state also had the world's highest energy consumption per person, about 80 percent of the total footprint.

Australia was the fourth largest burden on the world's resourceshectares), followed by Sweden and Finland (seven hectares), according to WWF.

The two Nordic countries have relatively low energy consumption -- about 15 percent of their footprint -- but have the highest demand for "food and fibre" -- five hectares -- mainly due to the timber industry's use of their forests.

China's 1.2 billion people had an average footprint of 1.5 hectares, just within the sustainable global average, but population controls have partly restrained the full impact of the Asian giant's recent industrial growth, WWF officials said.

The global table is dominated by industrialised countries and oil producers and WWF said that without corrective action, improved development goals for poor countries would be nearly impossible to achieve.

One of the report's authors, Jonathan Loh, also said higher oil prices could have a positive impact by improving the economic viability of alternative energy sources and helping their development.

Previous oil price rises or energy crises in the mid-1970s and in the early 1980s decreased energy consumption and carbon dioxide pollution levels temporarily, according to the report's data.

But a WWF official said the 1970s oil crisis also shifted some energy production to abundant but more polluting stocks of coal.

The report identified three key influences on the size of humanity's "ecological footprint": population size, the level of consumption, and the types of production systems used to transform natural resources into energy or products.

Loh said alternative industrial systems and energy sources could have a huge impact on restoring the balance between human need and what the earth can offer.

"The technology factor is going to be absolutely critical in determining whether the world's population is going to be sustainable," he said.

Compared to the last report two years ago which measured the environmental balance up to 1999, the latest edition also estimated that animal, fish and bird populations had continued to decline into this century.

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