One Earth
footprint
The Ecological Footprint
One of the key questions related to sustainable development is determining whether the human enterprise is conducting its activities within the planet’s ecological limits.
Ever since Plato, many discussions have taken place as to the maximum population an ecologically productive piece of land could support indefinitely.
Today, that question is often dismissed by economists who claim that any local biophysical constraint can be overcome through trade—by importing the necessary goods from somewhere else. However, at the global scale, the planet’s carrying capacity is limited; it is constrained by nature’s ability to produce goods and services on a sustainable basis, and its ability to absorb and recycle waste.
In other words, on a finite planet, there can be no “infinite growth”!
There is almost universal consensus that planetary ecosystems can no longer support current levels of economic activity, and even less so an increase. Despite our apparent disconnection to the natural world, humans remain biological entities, and thus depend directly on natural resources and the services rendered by ecosystems.
The Ecological Footprint is an indicator that was developed in the early 1990s in Vancouver, Canada, by Professor William Rees and his PhD student Mathis Wackernagel, now Director of the .
The Ecological Footprint attempts to measure the productive land and aquatic area necessary to support indefinitely a given population (using prevailing technology) in order to provide its energy and resources, and to absorb its wastes. Calculations of the Ecological Footprint show, for example, that were the entire world to adopt North American lifestyles – a development paradigm promoted by such international financial institutions as the World Bank – then 6 Earth-like planets would be necessary to be sustainable, and clearly, that is not possible.
The following links offer more in-depth information on the Ecological Footprint:
These links lead to Footprint calculators so that you can calculate the size of your own Footprint: