Environmental Footprinting

Ecological or environmental footprinting has its roots in an integrated response to two questions, both of which have arisen from a growing awareness that current patterns and scales of consumer culture are destructive of underpinning natural systems. First, what are the implications of a given level of consumption in terms of its environmental impact? [Page 536]Second, where should the environmental limits to that consumption lie? The following is an introduction to footprinting concepts, from their beginning to the present day.

Sustainability is fundamentally about environmental limits. It is not, as is often suggested in government and business documents, about balancing social, environmental, and economic impacts. Such trade-offs are required, but they are not central to a meaningful definition of sustainability. The need for trade-offs reflects shortcomings in our patterns of economic organization, technology, and other factors in terms of their sustainability performance. Although there are a wide variety of approaches to defining and measuring sustainability, ignoring the key notion of critical environmental limits or thresholds, breach of which leads to our current state of unsustainability, reduces the concept of sustainability to rhetoric, according to Paul Upham.

As originally conceived, environmental or ecological footprinting is based on this fundamental premise that there are environmental limits to consumption and that if these are not respected, adverse consequences will follow sooner or later. The term footprinting was initially developed and the concept given a quantitative dimension in the early 1990s, building on the idea of environmental “carrying capacity.” The concept has been applied to individuals and populations, including the world as a whole. Notable sources on environmental footprinting in this sense are the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Global Footprint Network.

The calculation method for limits-based footprinting involves associating indicators of economic activity with corresponding environmental indicators. That is, a specific level of environmental “impact” (or, more usually, a proxy for impact, such as emissions) is associated with each monetary unit (e.g., dollars) spent. The level and type of impact varies according to the type and quantity of consumption. Methodological advances have related national environmental accounts data to national material flows and household expenditure at local authority ward level, improving our ability to see where and how consumption impact is distributed (see Wiedman and Barrett 2005).

The final stage of limits-based environmental footprinting involves relating consumption to environmental limits to provide an indication of how close (or how far in excess) this consumption is relative to those limits. This stage is not always undertaken but nonetheless gives the footprint measure its name, as it relates consumption to the amount of biologically productive land and sea area required to produce the resources consumed and to absorb the wastes generated by production and consumption processes. The footprint is thus a measure of consumption in terms of biologically productive area, this being assumed to be the primary environmental limit, given our one planet. The theoretically available area is usually allocated to the planet's population on an equal per capita basis. This forms the denominator of a fraction in which the numerator is the area actually occupied by the individual's, region's, or nation's consumption. For industrialized nations and their population, the numerator usually exceeds the theoretical allocation. Calculated thus, humanity's footprint first exceeded earth's total “biocapacity” in the 1980s (see WWF 2008); this overshoot has been increasing since then and is only possible by some countries consuming other countries' entitlements.

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