Why offer an Academic License for the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts?

We seek to make the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts - the basis of all Ecological Footprint measurements - as reliable, transparent, accessible, and policy relevant as possible. We hope that through a collective effort, with our partners and the Ecological Footprint community, these accounts will continue to be an important tool in support of a thriving and just human economy that operates within the Earth's ecological limits.

Global Footprint Network provides the Academic Edition of the National Accounts through a free license in order to:

  • Foster education, academic review, and broader public understanding of the Ecological Footprint;
  • Make the underlying structure and method of the accounts widely available for full transparency and open scientific review of the methodology;
  • Insure that improvements are applied to the common accounts in order to ward against "fragmentation" and multiple versions.