It is now the fifth-largest per head in the world, and expanding fast, an international report produced by the WWF has found.

It takes an average of about 7.8 hectares of land to sustain the lifestyle of each Australian - significantly more than that needed for citizens of Britain, Canada or France - up from about 6.7 hectares in 2006.

The Living Planet report, produced by WWF, ranks nations by the level of their impact on the environment, and found that more than three-quarters of the world's population take more from the planet than they put back.

The average citizen of the globe requires just under three hectares to keep consuming at the current rate.

Along with agriculture, Australia's soaring greenhouse gas emissions, largely fuelled by burning coal to generate electricity, contribute most to the nation's comparatively poor performance, the report claims.

In sustainability terms, Australia ranks ahead of only the United Arab Emirates, the US, Kuwait and Denmark, and behind 146 other nations.

"Most of us are propping up our current lifestyles, and our economic growth, by drawing - and increasingly overdrawing - on the ecological capital of other parts of the world," the director-general of WWF International, James Leape, said.

"If our demands on the planet continue to increase at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we would need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles."

The US and China each use about 21pc of the world's resources, though the US has about a quarter of the latter's population.

The report estimated that demand for global resources outstripped supply by about 30pc.

Australia's record of declining biodiversity also contributed to its poor scorecard. Since European settlement, 27 mammal and 23 bird species have become extinct, mainly because of habitat loss and the introduction of invasive species such as foxes and cane toads.

Despite water restrictions and the drought, we still use more water per person than most other countries. Each Australian gets through an average 1.39 million litres a year, the report estimates - the world average is 1.24 million litres.

But those figures are skewed because most of our water is used in agriculture, meaning that sector ranks as the 15th highest in the world for water use.

There is a glimmer of hope in the nation's biocapacity, which is the estimated ability of the country's natural resources to provide for our needs.

If things continue as they are, we have about 50 years before we are consuming more of everything than the country can supply, the report says.