Footprint Network Blog -
If current population and consumption trends continue, Africa’s Ecological Footprint will exceed its biocapacity within the next twenty years, while a number of countries, including Senegal, Kenya and Tanzania, are set to reach that threshold in less than five years, according to a report issued today by Global Footprint Network and key partners.
The Africa Factbook 2009 reveals that while Africa’s population grew from 287 million to 902 million people between 1961 and 2005, the amount of biocapacity (food, fiber and timber resources that are renewably available) per person decreased by 67 percent during this same time period.
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September 25 marked this year’s Earth Overshoot Day: the day global demand on ecological services – from filtering CO2 to producing food, fiber and timber– outstripped what than nature can produce in this year, according to Global Footprint Network calculations. From now until the end of the year, we will meet our demand for ecological services by depleting resource stocks and accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“It’s a simple case of income versus expenditures,” said Global Footprint Network President Mathis Wackernagel. “For years, our demand on nature has exceeded, by an increasingly greater margin, the budget of what nature can produce. The urgent threats we are seeing now – most notably climate change, but also biodiversity loss, shrinking forests, declining fisheries, soil erosion and freshwater stress – are all clear signs: Nature is running out of credit to extend.”
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Global Footprint Network is pleased to announce the release of the Ecological Footprint Standards 2009. This document builds on the first set of internationally recognized Ecological Footprint Standards, released in 2006, and includes key updates – such as, for the first time, providing guidelines and standards for product and organizational Footprint assessments.
The Standards have been designed to ensure that Footprint analyses are produced consistently and according to community-proposed best practices. They aim to certify that assessments are conducted and communicated in a way that is accurate and transparent, by providing Standards and Guidelines on such issues as use of source data, derivation of conversion factors, establishment of study boundaries, and communication of findings. The Standards are applicable to all Footprint studies, including sub-national populations, products, and organizations. Global Footprint Network asks that all Partners comply with the most recent Ecological Footprint Standards, in order to promote the quality and integrity of Ecological Footprint Accounting.
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During the year and a half since French President Nicolas Sarkozy established the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, it has focused on one challenge: How can we move beyond GDP to broader measures of a nation’s economic, social and environmental well-being?
Global Footprint Network applauds this effort and congratulates the Commission for taking a crucial step toward answering that question through its release of the Stiglitz Report. The report synthesizes the complex field of economic performance and social progress indicators and substantiates the voices of early pioneers like Hazel Henderson and Hermann Daly.
With this report, there is now wide agreement that humanity’s success in the 21st century depends largely on robust navigational tools. The report has built a productive platform for further discussions. However, there is still much work to do. The report points out that there is no consensus yet as to which indicators provide the greatest value, and how they should be applied in guiding public policy.
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Global Footprint Network has launched the latest addition to its popular Ecological Footprint calculator with data specific to Switzerland. Click here to take the quiz.
Users walk an avatar through a Swiss countryside, answering questions about their consumption and lifestyle habits. At the end of the quiz they learn how much of the Earth’s resources it takes to support their lifestyle and what they can do to get closer to living within the means of our one planet. The Swiss version includes new, updated features to the Footprint calculator, including functionality in English .German, French and Italian languages.
The application was launched in partnership with WWF Switzerland as part of its campaign on environmental behavior, which for the past six years has featured the Ecological Footprint. This campaign has reached half a million people, and with the help of Global Footprint Network will now help the public understand their natural resource impact. According to WWF Switzerland, the calculator presents an attractive and illuminating tool that will engage people to optimize their every day behavior and reduce the Footprint. The Swiss calculator will be the first European dot on Global Footprint Network’s global calculator map.
For WWF Switzerland the footprint calculator is a valuable and attractive complementary tool that helps motivate people to participate in the various activities WWF Switzerland offers people to optimize their everyday behavior and reduce their Footprint.
Global Footprint Network is inviting corporate, government, and NGO partners to help expand the calculator to include additional features and locations. Please contact Meredith Stechbart, meredith@footprintnetwork.org, if you would like to be involved or would like the calculator customized for your organization.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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