Chronic poor environmental practices have led to a degradation of the world's water, air and land as well as wasting of precious natural resources. Reducing these environmental impacts requires quantitative knowledge of social systems’ impacts on the ecological systems. So how do we know how much of an impact our lifestyles and individual actions have on the Earth’s natural systems?
The ecological footprint, of a person or population, is an estimation of the amount of biologically productive land and sea area needed by that living entity. The area provides and regenerates the resources that are consumed and absorb and render harmless the corresponding waste, assuming current technology and resource management practice. It also compares human demand with the Earth's ecological capacity to regenerate it.
Background on Ecological Footprint
Conceived in 1990 and published in 1992 by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees at the University of British Columbia, the ecological footprint uses a a resource accounting method similar to Life Cycle Analysis. It tracks the consumption of energy, water and other materials (food, fiber) for each activity the entity does, and converts it into a normalized measure of land area called 'global hectares' (gha). The method uses a set of standards, which are in turn based on data collated through various collaborative efforts between academia, government, NGOs and consulting firms.
The originator of the ecological footprint concept, Dr. Mathis Wackernagel, is now the Executive Director of Global Footprint Network. The organization now produces internationally accepted methodological standards, so that consistent results can be produced and comparable across applications
Some Ecological Footprint Numbers
A simple quick estimate can be made. The Earth has 13.6 billion hectares of ecologically productive land and sea area, while assuming Earth’s human population at 6.2 billion people. That means every person on earth would have only 2.19 hectares if the earth's resources were shared equally. The U.S. footprint per capita was estimated to be 9.6 gha, compared to China's 1.6 gha per person.
A personal ecological footprint for each individual can be calculated to compare with this figure. Many excellent ecological calculators are available online. Examples are from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) or from the Global Footprint Network.
According to a WWF report, global society demanded 25% more biological capacity than the planet was able to provide in 2003. The United States, the European Union, and China represent more than 50% of the world's total ecological footprint and 30% of global available biological capacity, while the Asia Pacific region, with more than half of the world's population, uses slightly less than 40% of the planet's available biological capacity.
Similarly, in the 2007 United Nations Environment Programme’s Global Environment Outlook 4 (GEO-4), since 1987, global populations has risen 34%, with the amount of land per capita about one-quarter of what it was a century ago, and is expected to fall to about one-fifth of the 1900 level by 2050.
Thus, sustainability is a global imperative. This would require transforming our current production-consumption model towards one that is more eco-efficient and with a lower environmental footprint. This would mean increasing pressures for significant leaps in resource productivity and a movement to 'closed loop' solutions.
