Ecological Footprinting

Before people can learn to live sustainably, several key questions must be answered:

• How do we measure our impact, and therefore benchmark ‘sustainable living’?
• What constitutes a sustainable community or lifestyle?

Ecological Footprinting is a globally applicable, resource accounting tool that can help us answer these questions.

The Methodology

Simply put, Ecological Footprinting measures humanity’s demands upon nature in comparison to the biologically productive land and water available to us.

Every component of our lifestyle is broken down into the productive land and sea required to provide us with this good or service. The number of ‘global hectares’ (gha) needed to produce our food, sequester the carbon we emit, absorb the pollution we produce and meet our energy demands can all be calculated. The resulting total can then be compared to our ‘fair share’ of land and water, which is the world’s biologically productive land and sea divided by the global population, while leaving some designated proportion of land for wildlife and wilderness.

Recent calculations suggest that as a global society we are consuming about 30% more than the planet can sustain in the long term which means we need the equivalent of 1.2 planets to support ourselves at current rates of consumption.

However, different countries have different Footprints, as do the individuals within those countries. For example, if everyone on the planet were to consume natural resources and pollute the environment as the average European person, we would need three planets to support us and if everyone consumed as much as the average North American, we would need five planets.

BioRegional’s One Planet Community programme aims to address over consumption of the earth’s resources, as revealed by Ecological Footprinting calculations, by creating places where people can live a sustainable, one planet lifestyle.

For more information about Ecological Footprinting please visit the Global Footprint Network’s website by clicking here.

What does Ecological Footprinting tells us about developing a sustainable community?

When you separate out the various components of the Ecological Footprint of a “typical” individual in the UK the relative importance of lifestyle choices, compared to the impact of our buildings, becomes clear.

In fact 75% of a household’s Ecological Footprint are from activities such as food consumption, waste generation, day-to-day transport and the use of shared infrastructure and services (e.g. banking and hospitals) rather than from the energy used to heat our homes or the materials used to build them.

Consequently, in striving to achieve a sustainable future, we need to design communities where people can choose to live sustainably.

In such communities, the commuting distance between home and work, where the food comes from and how waste is dealt with will be as important as, if not more important than, the energy performance of the buildings. Infrastructure such as district hot water solutions and car clubs will be as important as building insulation.