Footprint Network Blog

Global Footprint Network Seeks European Director

European institutions and nations have emerged as global leaders in demonstrating how societies measure progress, true wealth and the well-being of people and nations. Global Footprint Network’s work in Europe is expanding rapidly, and we are seeking an entrepreneurial leader to build on this momentum and spearhead our European expansion. Click here for more information.

New Footprint Data to be Released this Month

Later this month, Global Footprint Network will release its 2009 National Footprint Accounts, with the latest data on the Ecological Footprint and biocapacity of over 100 nations and humanity as a whole. 

The accounts reflect continued refinements and improvements to the methodology, developed in conjunction with Global Footprint Network’s National Accounts Review Committee, made up of representatives of Global Footprint Network staff and partner organizations, in particular academic institutions.

The accounts include the most updated figures as to humanity’s global Ecological Footprint and how that compares with biocapacity. They will also include rankings of Ecological Footprint per capita for over 100 nations, as well as revised maps showing which countries have an ecological deficit and which have an ecological surplus. Check www.footprintnetwork.org for the most recent facts and figures.

EcosSistemas Puts Footprint to Use in Brazil

EcosSistemas, a Brazil-based environmental consulting firm, has embraced the Ecological Footprint as a tool uniquely suited to a rising concern: how to manage competing demands on Brazil’s lush, but increasingly pressured, biocapacity.

“In terms of land use, there is a struggle between forest and agriculture, between [productivity] and diversity,” says EcosSistemas CEO Alexander Van Parys Piergili.
The firm is looking to incorporate the Ecological Footprint into assessments of Brazilian biofuels and meat producers. But Piergili also has a larger mission. “More than just employing the Ecological Footprint ourselves as a company, what we want is to promote the use of the Footprint in Brazil.”
In October, EcosSistemas and Global Footprint Network cosponsored an Ecological Footprint training in Sao Paulo. The seminar drew participants from NGOs working throughout Brazil, Bolivia and Colombia. Ecosistemas and WWF Brazil has now established a group to expand use of the indicator throughout the region. “People are very interested to apply this tool. That is why it drew people from so far away,” said Piergili. “It is a very unique indicator.”

Envisioning A Low-Footprint Future for the UAE

What can a hyper-industrialized nation with one of the most resource-intensive economies in the world do to cut its Ecological Footprint? Recently, Global Footprint Network and researchers from the United Arab Emirates began a project to test scenarios for policies to cut the UAE’s per capita Ecological Footprint, currently the highest in the world.

The UAE has been working with Global Footprint Network for the past two years to create a baseline of data about its Ecological Footprint and to help the UAE position itself for the future by developing new policies and strategies. In recent years, Abu Dhabi has invested $15 billion toward the development of solar and other renewables. The newly established IRENA – International Renewable Energy Agency is making its headquarters in the UAE. And construction recently began on Masdar City, billed as the world’s first car-free, zero-carbon, zero-waste urban community that will ultimately house 1,500 clean-tech companies and 40,000 residents.

Recently, Global Footprint Network met with representatives of the Emirates Wildlife Society (EWS-WWF) and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, a university started in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Abu Dhabi government to shift Abu Dhabi’s energy sector toward clean energy. The group met to create a scenario calculator that will test the Footprint reduction potential of various policies and determine which offer the biggest ecological returns.

The project will begin by looking at the electricity-generating sector. It will evaluate policies that address drivers of both supply – such as production of energy from renewable sources – and demand, such as carbon taxes and electricity tariffs. Specific policies to be evaluated include:
• mandates for purchase and use of electric vehicles
• implementing widespread public transit systems
• various urban planning measures to create more compact and ecologically efficient development.

The group will present its first report, on the electricity sector, in February.

Read more about the UAE’s national Ecological Footprint Initiative.

A Race Between Political and Natural Tipping Points

According to Lester Brown’s Plan B, 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, human pressure on nature has reached the point that we risk a global threat to that most basic of resources: food. “The world is entering a new food era, one marked by rising food prices, growing numbers of hungry people, and emerging politics of food scarcity,” asserts Brown, who is director of the Earth Policy Institute.

Grain prices have tripled over a three year period. According to Brown, this surge is different from usual spikes in that it is not based on events such as droughts or war, but upon trends, such as the annual addition of 80 million people, people moving to higher standards of living, and a move to using grain and other food crops for biofuel production.

In India and China, the world’s two leading wheat and rice producers, disappearing glaciers are depriving the rivers of the snow-melt needed to maintain water flow in the dry season. “The projected melting of these glaciers if we stay with business as usual poses the most massive threat to food security the world has ever faced,” Brown writes.

Grim news, perhaps, but as Brown sees it, a goad to action. “The shift to renewable sources of energy is moving at a pace and on a scale we could not have imagined even two years ago,” he writes. The U.S. installed almost eight times more wind-generating capacity this year than new coal plants, and China and Europe also have massive renewable energy projects underway. And the energy efficiency revolution has barely begun, he says. For example, adopting new lighting technologies alone would enable us to close more than a quarter of the world’s coal-fired power plants.

Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, calling for a worldwide mobilization to stabilize population and climate before they spiral out of control, was first published in 2003 and is now released annually with updated numbers on population, climate and other ecological factors.
Click here for more information on Plan B and for a free download of the book.
Get the updated ecological, population and economic data featured in Plan B.

New Video on Overshoot

As part of its Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream symposium, the Pachamama Alliance has created a new video which explains the concept of ecological overshoot in interviews with Susan Burns and Mathis Wackernagel.

The Pachamama Alliance, which began as a partnership between indigenous people from Ecuador and a group of North Americans committed to ending deforestation, has grown to an international movement to reinvision the values that drive modern society. To learn more about Awakening the Dreamer, click here.

 

 

At Copenhagen, A New Context for International Cooperation

As world leaders gather in Copenhagen in December for global talks on action to address climate change, Global Footprint Network will host a side event aimed at invigorating the conversation by helping leaders see the self-interest in bold and timely action.

“Most world leaders have not yet recognized that it is in their interest to be the pioneers in climate policy, preferring to take a wait-and-see approach,” said Global Footprint Network President Mathis Wackernagel. On December 9th, Global Footprint Network will host a round-table discussion of high-level policymakers at the Copenhagen headquarters of the European Environment Agency.

The discussion is aimed at demonstrating the self-interest case for governments to act – why there is a strong strategic motive for governments to be pioneers and, conversely, a risk to being the laggards. The discussion will also highlight the emerging importance of biocapacity as a valuable national asset.

Global Footprint Network’s Copenhagen event will give decision-makers the data they need to prepare for a resource-constrained future. Understanding resource trends can help shift the perspective from: “the more we reduce CO2 emissions, the more it will cost us” to “the more we reduce resource consumption, the more healthy our economies will be and the lower our risk will be ”

The European Environment Agency is located at Kongens Nytorv 6
1050 Copenhagen, Denmark. To learn more, contact Rachel@footprintnetwork.org.

Read an article on Ecological Creditors and Debtors in the U.N. Environmental Programme’s Environment and Poverty Times.

National Geographic Looks at Impact of Growing Human Footprint

No matter how we define sustainability, National Geographic says in a special issue out this month, it must reflect this simple truth: “We are a species of unlimited appetites living on a planet with limited resources.”

EarthPulse: State of the Earth 2010, which opens with a full page of Global Footprint Network data, offers the clearest endorsement yet by a mainstream publication of the idea of sustainability as living within the means of one planet. The issue reflects a growing understanding that the crisis of climate change is a symptom of a larger problem: humanity’s growing metabolism of resources, and the strain that is putting on our natural systems.

EarthPulse: State of the Earth 2010 explores how the trends driving human society such as our growing numbers, our rising consumption, urban migration and global trade are interacting with the resources upon which life depends.  It is a story told in stark statistics and even more startling images. Women in Bangladesh wade through neck-high waters as melting Himalayan glaciers cause rivers to swell. Farmland is swallowed by China’s Gobi dessert, advancing 3,900 miles a year due to over-plowing and overgrazing. In Borneo, a scarred stretch of barren earth is all that remains of an old-growth forest.

“On a planet defined by unprecedented change, perhaps our most precious resource has become knowledge,” issue sponsor Allianz writes in the introduction. “Only with access to accurate, unbiased facts can a world brimming with possibilities and perils begin to make sense.”

It is Global Footprint Network’s mission to provide the data that can quantify the scope of the challenge and identify those solutions that will provide meaningful change. With resource accounting tools that enable us to measure and understand our ecological demand, we can begin to weigh our options and chart our course toward a sustainable human future.

Ecological Footprint Accounting: Just like the Family Budget

The Ecological Footprint can be understood as simply as a family budget, according to a new video released by the Community of Andean Nations (CAN).

The CAN and its member nations – Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia and Peru – began working with Global Footprint Network in early 2009 on an initiative to maintain one of the CAN region’s richest and most important assets: its natural resource base. The initiative seeks to demonstrate the interdependence between a country’s natural wealth, its economic health and, ultimately, the well-being of its people.

As part of the initiative, the CAN recently launched a video, to be circulated online and in television media, that explains this lofty concept in terms almost any family can relate to. “It’s as if a family needed to adjust expenditures because of having another child,” the video explains, “yet nevertheless, in spite of these forces, the family continued to spend more money.” Now, however, the video says, the CAN is working to address that situation –  in particular Ecuador, which has adopted specific Ecological Footprint reduction goals.

The CAN has also released a preview version of a report on the Ecological Footprint of the CAN countries that it will release with Global Footprint Network in 2010. The teaser, which introduces people to the concept of the Ecological Footprint and provides a snapshot of the data, can be downloaded here in English and Spanish. The longer report will provide an in-depth look at the ecological trends in each of the member countries, along with perspectives and commentary by in-country experts.

Factbook Charts Africa’s Footprint, Human Development Trends

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.

Though this is reflective of a global trend, it is particularly alarming for Africa, whose countries contain 12 percent of the world biocapacity, and whose population often suffers first and most tragically when humanity’s demand on nature exceeds what nature can renewably provide. As the world’s nations continue to deplete their own resources, demand on Africa’s raw materials continues to grow. Population growth and the impacts of climate change on crop production are exacerbating these pressures.

“Development that ignores the limits of our natural resources ultimately ends up imposing disproportionate costs on the most vulnerable,” said Global Footprint Network President Mathis Wackernagel. He noted that Africa is a region where ecological deficits can translate most directly into resource conflicts and shortages of food, fuel and other basic necessities for survival.

The Africa Factbook 2009 reports key indicators on human development, economic and ecological performance. Data on 24 different countries across the continent are included, along with guest essays by local representatives exploring on-the-ground challenges in each country. The Factbook is a culmination of research by Global Footprint Network, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and local experts, and is published in partnership with UNESCO, the Development Cooperation Directorate of the Luxembourg Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ).

Download the Africa Factbook.

To explore issues raised in the Factbook, Global Footprint Network will host a Webinar, Advancing Human Welfare Within the Earth’s Means, Tuesday Nov. 10th at 14:15 GMT. Facilitated by Dr. Wackernagel, the Webinar will include expert panelists from the African Development Bank, UNIDO and OECD, and other prominent institutions. Participation is free, but space is limited. Please click here to register. 

A print version of the Factbook in English and French will be available before the end of the year. For more information about the Africa Factbook, contact info@footprintnetwork.org.

Global Footprint Network recently submitted articles to U.N. Environmental Programme (UNEP) and OECD journals discussing Africa’s ecological trends and the risks and opportunities these present for the region’s future:

Read the Feature Article on the Footprint in OECD’s DACnews.
Read the article in UNEP’s Environment and Poverty Times