Footprint Network Blog - 08/2009
Global Footprint Network Joins Effort to Call Leaders to Action
Global Footprint Network will join hundreds of NGOs, businesses, government leaders and citizens at Climate Week NY˚C this September, calling on world leaders to secure an ambitious, fair and binding global deal in Copenhagen. Climate Week NY˚C is a series of high-level meetings, panel discussions, cultural events and public engagements to address and underscore the urgency for action on climate change.
Climate Week, which runs September 19 to 26, was born out of the recognition that, for one week in September, New York City will play host to important events seventy days prior to the UN Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen on December 7-18. These events include:
- UN Secretary-General’s day long summit on Climate Change
- Carbon Disclosure Projects’ 2009 report release
- Clinton Global Initiative
The weeklong series of events is a partnership between The Climate Group, United Nations, UN Foundation, City of New York, the tcktcktck campaign and Carbon Disclosure Project.
As part of the Climate Week program, Global Footprint Network’s Executive Director Mathis Wackernagel will present a lecture at New York University exploring the link between the Ecological Footprint and Climate Change, and how the Footprint framework can provide the strategic motive for government action. The lecture is free and open to the public. Click here for details.
Visit www.climateweeknyc.org and find out how you can show your support.
Categories:
Time to Retire GDP?
As a measure of economic performance, GDP should be relegated to the “dustbin of history,” says Eric Zencey in a New York Times Op Ed. Among its liabilities, the indicator fails to place adequate value on ecological services, Zencey says, which are are less expensive than built capital services yet in the long term far more essential to human well-being (not to mention other species). Basing policy on GDP has caused us to pursue a perverse strategy of replacing the efficient and often free services offered by nature (such as sun-drying of clothes, propogation of fish and natural flood control) with resource- and cost-intensive industrial services (such as machine drying of clothes, fish farms, and levees and dams) that liquidate our natural wealth.
Read the article R.I.P G.D.P by Eric Zencey
Categories:
The Natural Step Joins Global Footprint Network
The Natural Step, an international non-profit dedicated to education, advisory work and research in sustainable development, has joined Global Footprint Network as a Partner. The Natural Step Framework provides a comprehensive, science-based definition of sustainability and links it to real world applications.
Categories:
Ecological Economics Examines the Ecological Footprint
A recent issue of Ecological Economics (Vol. 68, Issue 7), the journal of the International Society of Ecological Economics, features a special section on Ecological Footprint analysis. Edited by Global Footprint Network President Mathis Wackernagel, the issue focuses on advancements in Footprint methodology and includes articles by Global Footprint Network research staff and partners. Aticles include a proposed method for incorporating methane into Ecological Footprint analysis, a comparison of Ecological Footprint and water footprint analysis, and a research agenda for improving the National Footprint Accounts.
Click here to see a preview of the issue.
Categories:
Happy Planet Index Shows Good Life Needn’t Cost the Earth
Costa Rica tops the list of countries able to provide long and happy lives for its citizens on a low Ecological Footprint, according to the Happy Planet Index, released this month by nef (the new economics foundation), a Global Footprint Network partner. Created as an alternative yardstick to economic-growth based measures of social progress, the Happy Planet Index (HPI) is designed to measure the ecological efficiency with which countries provide a high quality of life for their citizens.
Categories:
Novel Envisions Our Ecological Future
Environmentalist Peter Seidel, who has authored two non-fiction books dealing with human demand on nature, takes a different approach for exploring the consequences of ecological consumption with a new novel out in paperback, 2045: A Vision of Our Future.
Categories:
Gearing Up For Copenhagen, Seminars Look at Footprint, Biocapacity
At recent workshops in Lima and Bogota, Global Footprint Network explored the implications of ecological limits and biocapacity for the global climate negotiations at Copenhagen and beyond. The workshops were part of multi-day seminars on climate change organized by the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership and sponsored by the British Foreign Commonwealth Office.
Categories:
Moving Beyond GDP
How can we move beyond measuring economic expansion to broader indicators of progress that assess whether countries are providing for human well-being in a meaningful and lasting way? This question is the focus of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress created by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and chaired by Nobel Prize winning-economists Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University and Professor Amartya Sen of Harvard.
Categories:
Join the Twitter Campaign to End Overshoot!
With Earth Overshoot Day rapidly approaching, Global Footprint Network has launched a Twitter campaign to raise public awareness of ecological overshoot and encourage people to take action to end it. The campaign sends mini text and email messages, or “tweets,” with daily news, facts, suggestions and thought-provoking ideas. The campaign is designed to reach out to the nearly 14 million Twitter users, largely representing the under-35 demographic – the heirs to our current environmental policies and mounting ecological debt.
Click here to follow Global Footprint Network on Twitter.
Categories:
“Trendalyzer” Shows How Statistics Interact
What correlations are their between adult literacy and Ecological Footprint? Between population and energy use? The Trendalyzer tool, now available at the Global Footprint Network Web site, allows users to explore how various statistics relating to environmental impact (such as carbon emissions, energy use and Ecological Footprint), and quality of life (such as infant mortality, literacy, income and life expectancy) interact and inter-relate. Users are able to chose from dozens of publically-available data sets and chart how those factors relate to one another over time and geographic realms.
Categories: