COMMENTARY

Ecological footprints – How big is yours?

by the Green Hornet

Tuesday,  December 13, 2005

It’s the time of year when Christians celebrate the birth of a man who has made an enormous footprint on the Earth and on the lives of countless millions. But did you ever stop to think about YOUR footprint?

Not the footprint you leave in the sand as you amble down the beach searching for shells – the footprint you will leave on this Earth based on your everyday use of its resources. It’s all tied in with sustainable living – the “S word” that has been bandied around a lot lately.

Sometimes I wonder if we really know what “sustainable” means. It doesn’t mean maintaining the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. That is completely unsustainable. It basically means living within our means. We often talk about our “means” when discussing our incomes and how much we need to live. Most of us soon work out that we cannot have all the things we want out of life on our current incomes, so we go out and borrow money to pay for them. And we usually borrow against future earnings. We are, in essence, living beyond our current means.

Well, our ecological footprint is much the same thing. It is a way to assess how we are living based on the resources the Earth can provide to sustain that standard of living. And most, if not all, of us in the Caymans are living way beyond our ecological means.

Before trying to figure out how to get our ecological spending under control (perhaps we can look at it as debt management) let’s take a closer look at the analytical tool known as the Ecological Footprint (EF).

Developed by Dr Mathis Wackernagel and Professor William Rees, EF is not only a conceptual tool which helps to explain how different human activities have different “loads” – footprints – on the supportive environment; it is also a very practical tool for measuring human impact on the Earth’s resource base.

William Rees has been teaching the basic concepts of EF analysis since the 1970s, and the EF has been further developed by Mathis Wackernagel and other students working with Mr Rees at the University of British Columbia’s Healthy and Sustainable Communities Task Force. Mr Wackernagel and Mr Rees published the book Our Ecological Footprint – Reducing Human Impact on the Earth in 1996, and the concept has since been firmly established in the discourse on sustainable development, ecological economics and urban studies. 

The Ecological Footprint is a resource-management tool that measures how much land and water area a human population requires to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb its wastes, under prevailing technology. In order to live, we consume what nature offers. Every action has an impact on the planet’s ecosystems, and this is of little concern to us as long as human use of resources does not exceed what the Earth can renew. But are we taking more? 

Today, humanity’s Ecological Footprint is over 23 per cent larger than what the planet can regenerate. In other words, it now takes more than 14 months for the Earth to regenerate what we use in a single year. We maintain this “overshoot” by liquidating the planet’s ecological resources. This is a vastly underestimated threat and one that is not adequately addressed by anyone, anywhere.

By measuring the Ecological Footprint of a population (an individual, a city, a nation or all of humanity) we can assess our overshoot, which helps us manage our ecological assets more carefully. Ecological Footprints enable people to take personal and collective action in support of a world where humanity lives within the means of one planet.

The Challenge and the Goal: Sustainability

Sustainability is a simple idea. It is based on the recognition that when a resource is consumed faster than it is produced or renewed, the resource is depleted and eventually used up. In a sustainable world, society’s demand on nature is in balance with nature’s capacity to meet that demand. This is much the way our grandparents lived on and with the land and sea.

When humanity’s ecological resource demands exceed what nature can continually supply, we move into what is termed “ecological overshoot”. According to a report by the World Resources Institute, the United Nations Environment Programme, the UN Development Programme and the World Bank, World Resources 2000–2001, People and Ecosystems: The Fraying Web of Life, in addition to the growing depletion of non-renewable resources such as minerals, ores and petroleum, it is increasingly evident that renewable resources, and the ecological services they provide, are at even greater risk. Examples include collapsing fisheries, carbon-induced climate change, species extinction, deforestation, and the loss of groundwater in much of the world. 

We depend on these ecological assets to survive, and their depletion systematically undermines the well-being of people. Livelihoods disappear, resource conflicts emerge, land becomes barren, and resources become increasingly costly or unavailable. This depletion is exacerbated by the growth in human population as well as by changing lifestyles that are placing more demand on natural resources. 

Our Approach  to Sustainability: Resource Accounting

Keeping track of the compound effect of humanity’s consumption of natural resources and generation of waste is one key to achieving sustainability. 

As long as our governments and business leaders do not know how much of nature’s capacity we use or how resource use compares to existing stocks, overshoot may go undetected – increasing the ecological deficit and reducing nature’s capacity to meet society’s needs. 

The Ecological Footprint is a resource accounting tool used to address underlying sustainability questions. It measures the extent to which humanity is using nature’s resources faster than they can regenerate. It illustrates who uses how much of which ecological resources, with populations defined either geographically or socially. And it shows to what extent humans dominate the biosphere at the expense of wild species.

The Ecological Footprint clarifies the relationship of resource use to equity by explicitly tying individuals’ and groups’ activities to ecological demands. These connections help decision makers more accurately and equitably shape policy in support of social and environmental justice. 

Continued overshoot is not inevitable. The Ecological Footprint provides a systematic resource accounting tool that can help us plan for a world in which we all live well, within the means of our one planet.

Before you say “That’s the government’s responsibility, not mine,” why not take a few moments of time to measure your own Ecological Footprint?

There are several sites online which will do just that for you. Unfortunately, the Cayman Islands is not one of the countries you can click on, but since we here in Cayman try to emulate the US standard of living, it is fair to use that country as our basis for assessing our own Ecological Footprint.

There are several sites on the Web you can check this on. Here’s one which dovetails quite closely with our standard of living: http://ecofoot.org/. Just answer the simple questions, and it will tell you how many Earths are needed to sustain the manner in which you are currently living.

I can tell you right now you will be in for a bit of a shock. I consciously try to live in an ecologically sound manner, and my score came up to 3.2 Earths – not sustainable any way you look at it. When you get your score, then try to figure out ways in which you can reduce your impact on our planet (it’s the only one we’ve got!). It’s not an easy thing to do, but we cannot continue living in an unsustainable way.

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