Ecological Footprint

1. Assignment on
Ecological
Footprint
by[Syed Tauseef Hussain]
[M.Plan Enviro Plan III Sem]
[EP-C-8 Enviro Economics &
Auditing]

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 ABOUT ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT
SECTION 1.1 INTRODUCTION
SECTION 1.2 LITERATURE
CHAPTER 2 DIAGRAMMATIC REPRESENTATION
CHAPTER 3 DISCUSSION
SECTION 3.1 CASES IN PAST
SECTION 3.2 ARTICLES
CHAPTER 4 REFERENCES

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ABOUT ECOLOGICAL
FOOTPRINT
The Ecological Footprint is a measure of the demand human
activity puts on the biosphere. More precisely, it measures the
amount of biologically productive land and water area required
to produce all the resources an individual, population, or
activity consumes, and to absorb the waste they generate, given
prevailing technology and resource management practices.
This area can then be compared with biological capacity
(biocapacity), the amount of productive area that is available to
generate these resources and to absorb the waste. If a land or
water area provides more than one of these services it is only
counted once, so as not to exaggerate the amount of productive
area actually available. Land and water area is scaled according
to its biological productivity. This scaling makes it possible to
compare ecosystems with differing bioproductivity and in
different areas of the world in the same unit, a global hectare. A
global hectare represents a hectare with world average
productivity.
LITERATURE
World Bank 2000, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005).
Global economies depend on the biosphere for a steady supply
of the basic requirements for life: food, energy, fiber, waste
sinks, and other life-support services. Any depletion of these
services is particularly risky since human demand for them is
still growing, which can accelerate the rate at which natural
assets are liquidated. Out of this concern, the sustainability
proposition emerges. Sustainability is a simple idea. It is based
on the recognition that when resources are consumed faster
than they are renewed, or wastes emitted faster than they are
absorbed, the resources are depleted and eventually exhausted,

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and wastes are no longer sequestered and converted back into
resources fast enough to prevent accumulation in the biosphere.
The elimination of essential renewable resources is
fundamentally problematic, as substitution can be expensive or
impossible, especially when the problem is global in scale.
When humanity’s ecological demands in terms of resource
consumption and waste absorption exceed what nature can
supply, this ecological “overshoot” is a critical threat to
society’s well-being.
Figure 1Figure showing natural resources of planet earth.

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Figure 2 Ecological Deficit & Overshoot
 HISTORY OF &ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT AND
BIOCAPACITY ACCOUNTING IS BASED ON SIX
FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTIONS (WACKERNAGEL
2002):
The Ecological Footprint concept was created by Mathis
Wackernagel and William Rees at the University of British
Columbia in the early 1990’s (Wackernagel 1991, Rees 1992,
Wackernagel 1994, Rees 1996, Wackernagel and Rees 1996).

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1. The majority of the resources people or activities consume
and the wastes they generate can be tracked.
2. Most of these resource and waste flows can be measured in
terms of the biologically productive area necessary to maintain
them. Resource and waste flows that cannot be measured in
terms of biologically productive area are excluded from the
assessment, leading to a systematic underestimate of the total
demand these flows place on ecosystems.
3. By scaling each area in proportion to its bioproductivity,
different types of areas can be converted into the common unit
of average bioproductivity, the global hectare. This unit is used
to express both Footprint and biocapacity.
4. Because a global hectare of demand represents a particular
use that excludes any other use tracked by the Footprint, and all
global hectares in any single year represent the same amount of
bioproductivity, they can be summed. Together, they represent
the aggregate demand or Ecological Footprint. In the same way,
each hectare of productive area can be scaled according to its
bioproductivity and then added up to calculate biocapacity.
5. As both are expressed in global hectares, human demand (as
measured by Ecological Footprint accounts) can be directly
compared to global, regional, national, or local biocapacity.
6. Area demanded can exceed the area available. If demand on
a particular ecosystem exceeds that ecosystem’s regenerative
capacity, the ecological assets are being diminished. For
example, people can temporarily demand resources from forests
or fisheries faster than they can be renewed, but the
consequences are smaller stocks in that ecosystem. When the
human demand exceeds available biocapacity, this is referred to
as overshoot.

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Table 1 Important definitions of Ecological components.
Figure 3 Componets of EF

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Figure 4 Environmental footprint across the globe for 2004

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CALCULATION METHODOLOGY:
NATIONAL FOOTPRINT ACCOUNTS
The National Footprint Accounts aim to:
• Provide a scientifically robust and transparent
calculation of the demands placed by different nations on the
regenerative capacity of the biosphere;
• Build a reliable and consistent method that allows for
international comparisons of nations’ demands on global
regenerative capacity;
• Produce information in a format that is useful for
developing policies and strategies for living within biophysical
limits; and
• Generate a core dataset that can be used as the basis of
sub-national Ecological Footprint analyses, such as those for
provinces, states, businesses, or products.
The Ecological Footprint, in its most basic form, is calculated
by the following equation:
EF= DANNUAL/YANNUAL
where D is the annual demand of a product and Y is the annual
yield of the same product. Yield is expressed in global hectares.
The way global hectares are calculated is explained in more
detail below after the various area types are introduced. But in
essence, global hectares are estimated with the help of two
factors: the yield factors (that compare national average yield
per hectare to world average yield in the same land category)
and the equivalence factors (which capture the relative
productivity among the various land and sea area types).

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Therefore, the formula of the Ecological Footprint becomes:
EF=P.YF.EQF/YN
where P is the amount of a product harvested or waste emitted
(equal to DANNUAL above), YN is the national average yield for
P, and YF and EQF are the yield factor and equivalence factor,
respectively, for the country and land use type in question. The
yield factor is the ratio of national-to world-average yields. It is
calculated as the annual availability of usable products and
varies by country and year. Equivalence factors trasnlate the
area supplied or demanded of a specific land use type (e.g.
world average cropland, grazing land, etc.) into units of world
average biologically productive area: global hectares and varies
by land use type and year.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
First reference. Footprint Network
Footprint Atlas 2010
Additional references. www.worldbank.org