Europe at night viewed from space with city lights showing human activity in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and other countries.
By Mathis Wackernagel, CEO and co-founder of Global Footprint Network
Households and governments who want to succeed track both expenditure and income. Businesses similarly keep a keen eye on their balance sheets. So what does the physical balance sheet of our biggest household – the Earth – look like?
The income side would tell us how much our planet provides in matter and energy. The expenditure side would tell us how much material and energy people use – or what we call humanity’s ecological footprint.
Ecological footprint accounting was developed to address the question: how much of the biosphere’s regenerative capacity – or biocapacity – does human activity demand? Global Footprint Network measures this human demand for ecosystem services by adding up the space occupied by food, fibre and timber provision, space occupied by infrastructure, and the absorption of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Indeed, carbon dioxide emissions take up approximately 60% of humanity’s ecological footprint.
This audit can be done at any scale. Analysing the accounts for the entire world enables us to compare the material demands of humanity against the size of the global commons.
Global Footprint Network’s most recent data show that humanity overshoots the regenerative capacity of our global commons, and now demands about 70% more than what the biosphere can regenerate. In other words, we are using 1.7 Earths.
Keeping humanity’s ecological footprint within the planet’s biocapacity is the minimum threshold for sustainability. That threshold can be exceeded for some time, just as households can spend more money than they earn by dipping into savings, thereby depleting their assets. But persistent ecological overuse inevitably depletes nature’s stocks, through the collapse of fisheries, soil loss, freshwater overuse, over harvesting of forests - or leads to climate change from the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The Stockholm Resilience Centre has identified nine planetary boundaries, required to maintain the integrity of healthy, productive ecosystems. The UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) bring together a vision for safeguarding the health of the global commons while ensuring flourishing lives and wellbeing for everyone. The Stockholm Resilience Centre calls this vision the safe operating space. Oxford University economist Kate Raworth adds the social dimensions and calls it doughnut economics – with the outer circle of the doughnut representing the ecological boundaries within which we need to operate, and the inner one the social necessities required for thriving lives for all.
The core idea of socially and ecologically safe operating space was quantified for the first time in 2002 by Aurélien Boutaud. He combined the Ecological Footprint and United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP)’s Human Development Index (HDI) to track sustainable development outcomes country by country, city by city. His approach has evolved into the HDI footprint diagram. His framework has been used widely, by those including UNDP, UN Environment, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, and WWF’s Living Planet Report. It even serves as the foundation of the Philips sustainability programme.
One axis of the diagram is sustainability – or to what extent development can be supported within the Earth’s means. It is measured by the ratio between what people take compared to what the global commons can renew. The second axis, development, is measured by HDI, which captures income, access to basic education, and longevity.
Global sustainable development occurs where these two dimensions intersect. Available biocapacity is now 1.7 hectares per person. Some of this, however, is needed to support wildlife – and we also need to leave room for a growing human population. So the average ecological footprint per person worldwide needs to be significantly smaller if we are to live within nature’s means.
The figure above shows the latest results for most countries of the world (2013), comparing their footprints per person against the world’s per capita biocapacity, to show how far their development models could be replicated worldwide. Most countries do not meet both minimum requirements. Since every country has different amounts of biocapacity within its natural boundaries, this analysis can be adapted to each country. Using a scale from zero to one, UNDP considers an HDI of more than 0.7 to be “high human development”, with 0.8 “very high”.
For global sustainable development to occur, the world average would need to be in the marked panel at the bottom right (the global sustainable development quadrant). This is defined by an average footprint of less than 1.7 global hectares per person and an HDI score of more than 0.7. Yet the quadrant is ominously empty. The HDI score of the UK is 0.9, but its ecological footprint per person is five global hectares, high above the sustainable development quadrant. India has an HDI score of 0.6, and an ecological footprint per person of 1.1 global hectares, suggesting the need to increase the quality of life of citizens and the footprint.
Global sustainable development is necessary for a thriving future. The SDGs give us strategies on how to get there. Global Environment Facility’s (GEF) global commons initiative makes obvious the dependence on Earth’s physical health. It reminds us that our fabulous planet enables the wellbeing of all, if we manage it carefully.
Measuring whether we are achieving these desired outcomes enables us to take charge of the future we want. We can explore countries’ resource balances, and compare them with what would be in their economic self interest. And we can allocate our budgets and choose our development strategies more effectively so that they serve the goals we have wisely chosen through the SDGs and the Paris Climate Agreement.
Therefore, Global Footprint Network firmly endorses the GEF’s initiative, which stimulates the collaborative effort needed to create a world where all thrive within the means of the planet’s regenerative capacity.
