Ecological Footprinting
Lead Researchers: Dr Andrea Collins and Dr Andrew Flynn
We all place a pressure on the environment to provide us with all our basic needs: our food, our water, our shelter and the energy we use. The Ecological Footprint helps us to understand the impact that we have and measures it.
The starting point for the Ecological Footprint is that there is a limited amount of productive land on the planet to provide the resources that we consume. Sustainable development requires that we live within the carrying capacity of the earth, allowing our economies to develop while ensuring that basic human needs such as food, clean water, shelter and warmth are provided for everyone.
The Ecological Footprint calculates how much land we are using to support our resource consumption compared to how much land is actually available – it adds together the total land area required to provide us with all our consumer items, including the cars we drive, the food we eat and the energy we use to heat our homes and offices. The Ecological Footprint is measured in a standardised area unit equivalent to a world average productive hectare or ‘global hectare’ and is usually expressed as global hectares per person. One hectare is almost equivalent to the size of a football pitch at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium.
There is a limited amount of land on the planet to provide for all human resource demands – currently estimated by WWF to be 2.1 global hectares per person (WWF, 2008). However, the world’s population is currently using 2.7 global hectares per person. This indicates a situation of ‘overshoot’ where the world’s resources are being used faster than they can be regenerated.
Novel Applications of the Ecological Footprint
As the Ecological Footprint relates to the consumption activities of a defined population it has potentially many applications. For example, the Footprint has been applied to organisations, cities, regions and individuals. Since 2003, BRASS has been working on a number of Ecological Footprint related research projects and have developed a number of novel applications including major sports events (FA Cup Final), sustainable food consumption and proposed developments (Cardiff’s International Sports Village).
Links to Related Projects
- Reducing Cardiff's Ecological Footprint
- Knowledge and Practice in the Ecological Footprint Community
- Sport, Events and Tourism
Links to Related BRASS Events:
- Next Steps for Footprinting in Wales (September 2008)
- ‘Changing the Way We Play’, ESRC Seminar Series on Sustainable Consumption and Production (July 2008)
- International Ecological Footprint Conference (May 2007)
- Progress Towards Sustainability: Hard to Manage, Hard to Measure? (Social Science Week, 2006)
- Measuring Sustainability in the Food Supply Chain (October 2005)
