Ecological footprint
As Ecological Footprint accounts measure to what extent human activities operate within the means of our planet, they are a central metric for sustainability.
At a global scale, footprint assessments show how big humanity's demand is compared to what Earth can renew.
[9] It enables people to measure and manage the use of resources throughout the economy and explore the sustainability of individual lifestyles, goods and services, organizations, industry sectors, neighborhoods, cities, regions, and nations.
[1] The ecological footprint concept and calculation method was developed as the PhD dissertation of Mathis Wackernagel, in collaboration with his supervisor William Rees at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, from 1990 to 1994.
[15] The simplest way to define an ecological footprint is the amount of environmental resources necessary to produce the goods and services that support an individual's lifestyle, a nation's prosperity, or the economic activity of humanity as a whole.
The footprint can be a useful tool to educate people about overconsumption and overpopulation, with the aim of altering personal behavior or public policies.
[24] Comparisons of TEFs can indicate the benefits of alternative destinations, modes of travel, food choices, types of lodging, and activities.
The same is true for ores and minerals, where the limiting factor is how much damage to the biosphere we are willing to accept to extract and concentrate those materials, rather than by how much of them is still left underground.
Such applications translate the consumption of energy, biomass (food, fiber), building material, water and other resources into normalized land areas called global hectares (gha) needed to provide these inputs.
[30] The total footprint number of Earths needed to sustain the world's population at that level of consumption are also calculated.
[7] If this rate of resource use is not reduced, persistent overshoot would suggest the occurrence of continued ecological deterioration and a potentially permanent decrease in Earth's human carrying capacity.
[46][47][48] This reminds us that ecological footprint calculations are anthropocentric, assuming that all Earth's biocapacity is legitimately available to human beings.
According to Wackernagel and the organisation he has founded, the Earth has been in "overshoot", where humanity is using more resources and generating waste at a pace that the ecosystem cannot renew, since the 1970s.
For the rest of the year, we are maintaining our ecological deficit by drawing down local resource stocks and accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
[1] This means their citizens use more resources and generate more waste and pollution than can be sustained by the biocapacity found within their national boundaries.
[54] In other cases, per capita resource use may be lower than the global available average, but countries are running an ecological deficit because their populations are high enough that they still use more bioproductive land than they have within their national borders.
[53] More recently, Rees has written:The human enterprise is in potentially disastrous 'overshoot', exploiting the ecosphere beyond ecosystems' regenerative capacity and filling natural waste sinks to overflowing.
This situation is the inevitable outcome of humanity's natural expansionist tendencies reinforced by ecologically vacuous growth-oriented 'neoliberal' economic theory.
[18]Rees now believes that economic and demographic degrowth are necessary to create societies with small enough ecological footprints to remain sustainable and avoid civilizational collapse.
[58] The figure (right) examines sustainability at the scale of individual countries by contrasting their Ecological Footprint with their UN Human Development Index (a measure of standard of living).
[61] The information generated by reports at the national, regional and city scales confirm the global trend towards societies becoming less sustainable over time.
[40] BedZED, a 96-home mixed-income housing development in South London, was designed by Bill Dunster Architects and sustainability consultants BioRegional for the Peabody Trust.
The European Commission's review found the concept unique and useful for assessing progress on the EU's Resource Strategy.
[83] A number of national government agencies have performed collaborative or independent research to test the reliability of the ecological footprint accounting method and its results.
Such reviews include those of Switzerland,[85][86] Germany,[87] France,[88] Ireland,[89] the United Arab Emirates[90] and the European Commission.
[93] Similarly, Newman (2006) has argued that the ecological footprint concept may have an anti-urban bias, as it does not consider the opportunities created by urban growth.
[94] He argues that calculating the ecological footprint for densely populated areas, such as a city or small country with a comparatively large population—e.g.
Critics argue that this is a dubious characterization, since farmers in developed nations may easily consume more resources than urban inhabitants, due to transportation requirements and the unavailability of economies of scale.
Even if true, such criticisms do not negate the value of measuring different cities', regions', or nations' ecological footprints and comparing them.
Similarly if organic farming yields were lower than those of conventional methods, this could result in the former being "penalized" with a larger ecological footprint.
