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Ecological Footprints of the Human Race
by William E. Rees
(William Rees directs the School of Community and Regional Planning at
the University of British Columbia. This article first appeared in Yes.
A Journal of Positive Futures, Spring/Summer 1996.)
Most people in urban industrial societies have become distanced from
the land, unaware that the growing amount of material and energy needed
to support our consumer lifestyles and the waste we generate in
producing and consuming makes us more dependent on natures services
today than at any previous time in history. My students and I have
become intrigued by this issue. We have estimated the area of
productive land required to produce the material and energy needed for,
and to absorb the waste produced by, specific patterns of material
consumption.
The Average North American
This approach shows that the average North American needs,
conservatively, 12 to 15 acres of productive land to support his or her
consumer lifestyle. Using this information, we can estimate the
ecological footprint of an entire population or economy. The ecological
footprint is the total area of land - wherever it might be located -
required to produce the resources and assimilate the wastes of that
population or economy. Wealthy regions, and even whole countries,
survive by making use of a total area of land vastly larger than the
area they actually occupy.
The Greater Vancouver region, for example, has a population of 1.6
million and an area of about 724,000 acres. However, its residents
support themselves by making use of at least 17,020,000 acres of
ecologically productive land. In other words, Greater Vancouver depends
on an area 23.5 times larger than its own political territory.
This example shows that the ecological locations of human settlements
no longer coincide with their geographic locations. It also illustrates
that while so-called developed regions might seem ecologically
prosperous, their consumer economies are running massive ecological
deficits with the rest of the planet. These are real deficits, but
they are not revealed in trade balances or current accounts.
The problem is that in a finite world not every region or country can
be a net importer of biophysical goods and services. Extrapolating the
present North American lifestyle to an anticipated world population of
10 billion people, using existing technologies, would require about 125
billion acres of ecologically productive land. Our planet has,
however, only 22 billion acres of such land. To bring just the present
world population of almost 6 billion up to the North American standards
would require at least 2 addition Earths, or else a 3-fold improvement
in efficiency of resource use and capacity for waste assimilation.
Reduce Consumption!
Ecological footprint analysis suggests that the greatest contribution
the developed world can make to sustainability is to reduce its
consumption, by every means at is disposal. A 3-to-6-fold increase in
efficiency of resource use might be feasible - and might also be, in
political terms, the most acceptable approach to sustainability.
However, there may also be greater ecological, community, and personal
merit in learning to live more simply, so that others can live at all.
(This article appeared in Sustainable communities: Guide for Grassroots
Activists, edited by Marilyn Hempel. Executive Director of the
Population Coalition.)
What is your Ecological Footprint?
To compute your own ecological footprint, read: M. Wackernagel & W.
Rees. Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth.
New Society Publishers. 1996
Comparing Footprints (Average Footprint in acres per person)
Country Acres
USA 22
Canada 17
Japan 17
Russia 15
France 14.5
Germany 12
United Kingdom 11.5
Mexico 5.6
China 2.5
India .25
Fair Earthshare: World Average 5.5 (with a population of billion)
As we are moving beyond 6 billion people, the Fair Earthshare will be
shrinking.
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