About Global Footprint Network
Our mission is to promote a sustainable economy by advancing the Ecological
Footprint, a measurement tool that makes the reality of planetary limits
relevant to decision-makers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
