ecological footprint measures human demand for nature, that is, the quantity of nature needed to support people or the economy. It tracks this demand through an ecological accounting system. This account contrasts with the biological productive areas that people use for their consumption to the biologically productive areas available in a region or world (biocapacity - a productive area that can regenerate what humans want from nature). In short, it is a measure of human impact on the earth's ecosystems and reveals the human economic dependence on natural capital.
Ecological footprints are defined as biologically productive areas needed to provide everything that humans use: fruits and vegetables, fish, wood, fiber, carbon dioxide absorption from fossil fuel use, and space for buildings and roads.
Traces and biocapacity can be compared on an individual, regional, national or global scale. Both the footprint and biocapacity change every year by number of people, consumption per person, production efficiency, and ecosystem productivity. On a global scale, trace assessment shows how much human demand is compared to what the Earth planet can renew. The Global Footprint Network calculates the ecological footprint of the UN and other data for the world as a whole and for more than 200 countries. They estimate that by 2013, mankind has used natural capital 1.6 times as fast as nature can renew it.
Ecological footprint analysis is widely used around Earth to support sustainability assessments. It can be used to measure and manage the use of resources throughout the economy and explore the sustainability of the lifestyles of individuals, goods and services, organizations, industry sectors, neighborhoods, cities, regions and countries. Since 2006, a set of first ecological footprint standards that describes both communication and calculation procedures. The latest version is the latest standard from 2009
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In 2013, the Global Jeep Network estimates global ecological footprints as 1.6 Earth planets. This means that, according to their calculations, the planet's ecological services are used 1.6 times faster than the updated ones.
Ecological footprints can be calculated on any scale: for any activity, individual, community, city, city, region, nation, or humanity as a whole. Cities, because of population concentration, have large ecological footprints and have become the zero point for footprint reduction.
Global Traces: There is currently no definitive way to measure global footprint, and any attempt to describe the capacity of ecosystems in a single number is a massive simplification of thousands of major renewable resources, unused or recharged by same speed. However, there has been some convergence of metrics and standards since 2006.
Ecological City Trail: is being measured. There are two types of measurement used. The first measure of ecosystem displacement is defined as the urban area minus the remainder of the green space. This is a measurement of areas that do not include human or other biological activity. A second attempt to measure the health of living ecosystems. In particular, it tries to measure both the area and biological health of the ecosystems that survive within urban areas such as nature reserves, parks, other green spaces. City footprints are calculated and scored with the city's ecological index.
Maps Ecological footprint
Overview
The first academic publication of the ecological footprint was William Rees's work in 1992. Ecological footprint concepts and methods were developed as PhD Mathis Wackernagel's dissertation, under Rees's supervision at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, from 1990-1994. Initially, Wackernagel and Rees call the concept of "appropriate carrying capacity". To make the idea more accessible, Rees came up with the term "ecological footprint", inspired by a computer technician who praised the "small footprint on the desk" of his new computer. In early 1996, Wackernagel and Rees published the book Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on Earth by Illustration by Phil Testemale.
Site values ​​at the end of the survey are categorized for Carbon, Food, Housing, and Goods and Services as well as the total amount of Earth footprint required to keep the world population at that level of consumption. This approach can also be applied to activities such as product creation or driving a car. Resource accounting is similar to a life cycle analysis in which energy consumption, biomass (food, fiber), building materials, water and other resources are converted to a normal size of a land area called global hectares (gha).
Ecological footprint per capita (EF), or ecological footprint analysis (EFA), is a means for comparing consumption and lifestyle, and checking this against the natural ability to provide this consumption. This tool can inform policy by examining the extent to which a country uses more (or less) than is available in its territory, or to what extent the nation's lifestyle will be replicated worldwide. This trail can also be a useful tool for educating the public about the carrying capacity and over consumption, with the aim of changing personal behavior. Ecological footprints can be used to argue that many lifestyles are currently unsustainable. Such a global comparison also clearly shows the inequality of resource use on the planet at the beginning of the 21st century.
In 2007, the average biological productive area per person worldwide was about 1.8 hectares globally (gha) per capita. The US per capita footprint is 9.0 gha, and Switzerland is 5.6 gha, while China is 1.8 gha. WWF claims that human traces have exceeded the 20% biocapacity (availability of the planet's natural resources). Wackernagel and Rees initially estimated that the biological capacity available to 6 billion people on Earth at the time was about 1.3 hectares per person, which was smaller than the 1.8 hectares globally published for 2006, since the initial study did not use global or including bioproductive marine areas.
Some NGOs offer ecological footprint calculators ( see Trace Calculator, below).
Methodology
The method of calculating ecological footprint at the national level is described in l Atlas Jejak 2010 or in more detail in the Calculation Methodology for the National Footprint Account. The National Account Review Committee has also published a research agenda on how this method will be improved.
In 2003, Jason Venetoulis, Carl Mas, Christopher Gaudet, Dahlia Chazan, and John Talberth developed Footprint 2., which offered a range of theoretical and methodological improvements with the standard footprint approach. Four major improvements are that they cover the entire surface of the Earth in the estimation of biocapacity, the space allocated to other species (ie, non-humans), renewing the baseline of equality factors from agricultural land to net primary productivity (NPP), and perfected. carbon components from traces based on the latest global carbon model.
Study in the United Kingdom
The average ecological footprint of the UK is 5.45 hectares per capita globally (gha) with interregional variations ranging from 4.80 gha (Wales) to 5.56 gha (East England).
Two recent studies have examined small communities with relatively low impact. BedZED, a 96-house residential housing development in South London, was designed by Bill Dunster Architects and a BioRegional sustainability consultant for the Peabody Trust. Despite being inhabited by relatively "mainstream" home buyers, BedZED is found to have a 3.20 gha trace due to renewable energy production on site, energy-efficient architecture, and an extensive green lifestyle program that includes first place in the London club. The report does not measure the additional footprint of the 15,000 visitors who have toured the BedZED since it was completed in 2002. Findhorn Ecovillage, a deliberate rural community in Moray, Scotland, has a total trace of 2.56 gha, including many visitors and visitors travel to the community to do a housing course there and the nearby Cluny Hill College campus. However, the residents themselves have a footprint of 2.71 gha, slightly above the UK national average and one of the lowest ecological footprints of any community measured so far in the industrial world. Keveral Farm, an organic farming community in Cornwall, was found to have a 2.4 gha trace, albeit with substantial differences in footprints among community members.
Ecological footprint on an individual level
In a 2012 study of consumers who acted "green" vs. "chocolate" (where green people "were estimated to have less ecological impact than" chocolate "consumers), the conclusion was" the study found no significant differences between carbon footprints green and brown consumer legs. "A 2013 study concluded the same.
A 2017 study published in Environmental Research Letters suggests that the most significant way individuals can take to reduce their own carbon footprint is to have fewer children, followed by life without vehicles, air travel and adopting plant-based diet.
Reviews and criticism
Initial criticism was published by van den Bergh and Verbruggen in 1999, which was updated in 2014. Another critique was published in 2008. A more complete review commissioned by the Directorate General for the Environment (EC) was published in June 2008. The reviews found Ecological Footprint "a useful indicator for assessing the progress of the EU Resource Strategy" the authors note that the Ecological Footprint analysis is unique "in its ability to connect resource use with the concept of carrying capacity." The review notes that further improvements in data quality, methodology and assumptions are required.
A recent critique of this concept is due to Blomqvist et al., 2013a, with replies from Rees and Wackernagel, 2013, and answers by Blomqvist et al., 2013b.
An additional criticism is due to Giampietro and Saltelli (2014a), with replies from Goldfinger et al., 2014, replies by Giampietro and Saltelli (2014a), and additional comments from van den Bergh and Grazi (2015).
A number of countries have engaged in research collaboration to test the validity of the method. These include Switzerland, Germany, United Arab Emirates, and Belgium.
Grazi et al. (2007) has conducted a systematic comparison of ecological footprint methods with spatial welfare analysis that includes environmental externalities, agglomeration effects and trade advantages. They found that both methods can lead to very different differences, and even opposite, the ranking of spatial patterns differs from economic activity. This should not be surprising, however, since both methods answer different research questions.
Calculates ecological footprints for densely populated areas, such as cities or small countries with relatively large populations - eg. New York and Singapore respectively - can cause the perception of this population as "parasites". This is because this community has little intrinsic biocapacity, and instead has to rely on great outback . Critics argue that this is a dubious characterization because rural farmers who are mechanical in the developed world can easily consume more resources than the urban population, due to transportation requirements and unavailability of economies of scale. Furthermore, such moral conclusions seem to be arguments for autarky. Some even take this train of thought a step further, claiming that Footprint denies the merits of trading. Therefore, critics argue that Footprint can only be applied globally.
This method seems to reward the replacement of native ecosystems with high productivity agricultural monocultures by setting a higher biocapacity to the region. For example, replacing ancient forests or tropical forests with monoculture forests or plantations can increase ecological footprint. Similarly, if organic farm yields are lower than conventional methods, this can lead to "punished" traces with larger ecological footprints. Of course, this insight, while valid, comes from the idea of ​​using soles as the only metric. If ecological footprint use is equipped with other indicators, such as one for biodiversity, the problem may be solved. Indeed, the WWF Living Planet Report complements the biennial calculation of the site with the Living Planet Index of biodiversity. Manfred Lenzen and Shauna Murray have created a modified Ecological Trail that considers biodiversity to be used in Australia.
Although ecological footprint models prior to 2008 treated nuclear power in the same way as coal power, the real-world effects of the two are very different. A life-cycle analysis centered on the Swedish Nuclear Power Plant Forsmark estimates carbon dioxide emissions at 3.10 g/kW? H and 5.05 g/kW? H in 2002 for the Torness Nuclear Power Plant. This is proportional to 11 g/kW? H for hydroelectric power, 950 g/kW? H for installed coal, 900 g/kW? H for oil and 600 g/kW? H for natural gas generation in the United States in 1999. Figures released by Mark Hertsgaard, however, show that due to delays in building nuclear plants and the costs involved, investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy have seven times the return on investment investments in nuclear energy.
Sweden's Vattenfall utility is conducting a full-cycle greenhouse gas emissions study of energy sources used by utilities to generate electricity: Nuclear, Hydro, Coal, Gas, Solar Cells, Peat and Wind. The net result of this study is that nuclear power produces 3.3 grams of carbon dioxide per kW? H of power generated. This compares to 400 for natural gas and 700 for coal (according to this study). The study also concluded that nuclear power produces the smallest amount of CO 2 of any of their electrical sources.
There are claims that the problem of nuclear waste is not close to the problem of fossil fuel waste. A 2004 article from the BBC states: "The World Health Organization (WHO) says 3 million people are killed worldwide by yearly outside air pollution from vehicles and industrial emissions, and 1.6 million indoors through the use of solid fuel." In the US alone, fossil fuel waste kills 20,000 people every year. The coal-fired power plant releases 100 times more radiation as a nuclear power plant with the same wattage. It is estimated that in 1982, the burning of US coal released 155 times more radioactivity into the atmosphere as the Three Mile Island incident. In addition, fossil fuel waste causes global warming, leading to increased deaths from typhoons, floods, and other weather events. The World Nuclear Association provides a comparison of accidental deaths among various forms of energy production. In their comparison, deaths per TW-year of electricity produced (in the United Kingdom and the United States) from 1970 to 1992 are cited as 885 for hydropower, 342 for coal, 85 for natural gas, and 8 for nuclear.
The State of the Environment report of the Western Australian Government includes an average Ecological Footprint size of seven times the average Western Australian per person on the planet in 2007, totaling about 15 hectares.
Traces by country
The world's average ecological footprint by 2013 is 2.8 hectares globally per person. Average per country ranges from more than 10 to less than 1 global hectare per person. There are also high variations within the country, based on individual lifestyles and economic possibilities.
GHG traces or a narrower carbon footprint are components of an ecological footprint. Often, when only carbon footprints are reported, it is expressed in CO2 weight (or CO2e representing GHG), but can also be expressed in terrestrial areas such as ecological footprint. Both can be applied to products, people or the whole community.
Implications
... the average world citizen has an environmental footprint of approximately 2.7 hectares on the global average while there are only 2.1 hectares of global bioproductive land and water per capita on earth. This means that humanity has exceeded global biocapacity by 30% and is now living unsustainable by depleting the stock of "natural capital"
See also
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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