Sustainability: Other Indicators

This lecture by the instructor covers the assessment of sustainability conditions, including total wealth per capita, natural capital per capita, and indicators for wealth components. It also delves into ecological footprint methods, equivalence factors, yield factors, and the computation of a country's biocapacity. The comparison of ecological footprint to biocapacity, flows of appropriated production, and global footprint evolution are discussed. Furthermore, the lecture explores ecological deficits/reserves, countries with biocapacity reserves/deficits, and Earth Overshoot Day. The presentation concludes with an analysis of country footprints measured by overshoot, highlighting the importance of understanding the ecological impact of human activities.

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The ecological footprint is a method promoted by the Global Footprint Network to measure human demand on natural capital, i.e. the quantity of nature it takes to support people and their economies. It tracks this demand through an ecological accounting system. The accounts contrast the biologically productive area people use for their consumption to the biologically productive area available within a region, nation, or the world (biocapacity, the productive area that can regenerate what people demand from nature).

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The Global Footprint Network was founded in 2003 and is an independent think tank originally based in the United States, Belgium and Switzerland. It was established as a charitable not-for-profit organization in each of those three countries. Its aim is to develop and promote tools for advancing sustainability, including the ecological footprint and biocapacity, which measure the amount of resources we use and how much we have. These tools aim at bringing ecological limits to the center of decision-making.

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The biocapacity or biological capacity of an ecosystem is an estimate of its production of certain biological materials such as natural resources, and its absorption and filtering of other materials such as carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Biocapacity is used together with ecological footprint as a method of measuring human impact on the environment. Biocapacity and ecological footprint are tools created by the Global Footprint Network, used in sustainability studies around the world.

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