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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ecological footprint | 2/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T07:17:56.107504+00:00 | kb-cron |
Ecological footprint accounting is built on the recognition that regenerative resources are the physically most limiting resources of all. Even fossil fuel use is far more limited by the amount of sequestration the biosphere can provide rather than by the amounts left underground. The same is true for ores and minerals, where the limiting factor is how much damage to the biosphere we are willing to accept to extract and concentrate those materials, rather than by how much of them is still left underground. Therefore, the focus of ecological footprint accounting is human competition for regenerative resources. The amount of the planet's regeneration, including how many resources are renewed and how much waste the planet can absorb, is dubbed biocapacity. Ecological footprints therefore track how much biocapacity is needed to provide for all the inputs that human activities demand. It can be calculated at any scale: for an activity, a person, a community, a city, a region, a nation, or humanity as a whole. Footprints can be split into consumption categories: food, housing, and goods and services. Or it can be organized by area types occupied: cropland, pasture, forests for forest products, forests for carbon sequestration, marine areas, etc. When this approach is applied to an activity such as the manufacturing of a product or driving a car, it uses data from life-cycle analysis. Such applications translate the consumption of energy, biomass (food, fiber), building material, water and other resources into normalized land areas called global hectares (gha) needed to provide these inputs. Since the Global Footprint Network's inception in 2003, it has calculated the ecological footprint from UN data sources for the world as a whole and for over 200 nations (known as the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts). This task has now been taken over by FoDaFo and York University. The total footprint number of Earths needed to sustain the world's population at that level of consumption are also calculated. Every year the calculations are updated to the latest year with complete UN statistics. The time series are also recalculated with every update, since UN statistics sometimes correct historical data sets. Results are available on an open data platform. Lin et al. (2018) find that the trends for countries and the world have stayed consistent despite data updates. In addition, a recent study by the Swiss Ministry of Environment independently recalculated the Swiss trends and reproduced them within 1–4% for the time period that they studied (1996–2015). Since 2006, a first set of ecological footprint standards exist that detail both communication and calculation procedures. The latest version are the updated standards from 2009. The ecological footprint accounting method at the national level is described on the website of the Global Footprint Network or in greater detail in academic papers, including Borucke et al. The National Accounts Review Committee has published a research agenda on how to improve the accounts.
== Footprint measurements ==
For 2023 Global Footprint Network estimated humanity's ecological footprint as 1.71 planet Earths. According to their calculations this means that humanity's demands were 1.71 times more than what the planet's ecosystems renewed.
If this rate of resource use is not reduced, persistent overshoot would suggest the occurrence of continued ecological deterioration and a potentially permanent decrease in Earth's human carrying capacity.
In 2022, the average biologically productive area per person worldwide was approximately 1.6 global hectares (gha) per capita. The U.S. footprint per person was 7.5 gha, and that of Switzerland was 3.7 gha, that of China 3.6 gha, and that of India 1.0 gha. In its Living Planet Report 2022, the WWF documents a 69% decline in the world's vertebrate populations between 1970 and the present, and links this decline to humanity greatly exceeding global biocapacity. Wackernagel and Rees originally estimated that the available biological capacity for the 6 billion people on Earth at that time was about 1.3 hectares per person, which is smaller than the 1.6 global hectares published for 2024, because the initial studies neither used global hectares nor included bioproductive marine areas.
According to the 2018 edition of the National footprint accounts, humanity's total ecological footprint has exhibited an increasing trend since 1961, growing an average of 2.1% per year (SD= 1.9). Humanity's ecological footprint was 7.0 billion gha in 1961 and increased to 20.6 billion gha in 2014, a function of higher per capita resource use and population increase. The world-average ecological footprint in 2014 was 2.8 global hectares per person. The carbon footprint is the fastest growing part of the ecological footprint and accounts currently for about 60% of humanity's total ecological footprint. The Earth's biocapacity has not increased at the same rate as the ecological footprint. The increase of biocapacity averaged at only 0.5% per year (SD = 0.7). Because of agricultural intensification, biocapacity was at 9.6 billion gha in 1961 and grew to 12.2 billion gha in 2016. However, this increased biocapacity for people came at the expense of other species. Agricultural intensification involved increased fertilizer use which led to eutrophication of streams and ponds; increased pesticide use which decimated pollinator populations; increased water withdrawals which decreased river health; and decreased land left wild or fallow which decreased wildlife populations on agricultural lands. This reminds us that ecological footprint calculations are anthropocentric, assuming that all Earth's biocapacity is legitimately available to human beings. If we assume that some biocapacity should be left for other species, the level of ecological overshoot increases.