Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
access to land, clean water, adequate food, fuel and materials; vulnerable people
cannot break out of the poverty trap and prosper.
(WWF-Int, 2012: 57)
By focusing on the tension between the standard and quality of life and the
ecological integrity of the planet, ecological footprinting effectively captures the
primary sustainability notion that the economy is a means to an end and not an
end in itself. People's lived experience, life satisfaction, and social and human
development are at the root of much of the work that has gone into developing
ecological footprint analysis. For example, Wackernagel and Yount (1998: 513)
define sustainability as 'the continuous support of human quality of life [in other
words, people's subjectively perceived well-being] within a region's ecological carrying
capacity [or the ecological or biotic capacity within a region to regenerate used
resources and assimilate waste]'. The tension between living well and living
sustainably, and the reality of the interconnected nature of the world, where even
renewable resources like forests can disappear if we exploit them without a thought
for tomorrow, is clearly brought to the fore. For Stuart Hart (1997), today's businesses
need to go beyond greening their processes and practices. They need to make a
positive impact. 'Ironically, the greatest threat to sustainable development today is
depletion of the world's renewable resources' as soils, water, forests and fisheries
have all been pushed beyond their limits by industrial development, economic growth
and human population increase (Hart, 1997: 69). It also makes trade imbalances
and the eco-ameliorating effects of new technology visible, while expressing the first
and second laws of thermodynamics. These laws state, respectively, that mass is
neither created nor destroyed but just gets rearranged and energy is neither created
nor destroyed but is just transformed, and that everything ultimately runs down.
Despite all the advantages, ecological footprinting has three significant drawbacks:
it is not a dynamic modelling tool, has no predictive capacity and does not factor
in the needs of non-human species. It is not a forecast of the future or even an
analysis of socio-political issues, but simply a means of indexing biophysical impacts,
of evaluating the present state of affairs and providing some tools for understanding
possible alternative 'what if' scenarios. Furthermore, it does not prescribe what an
individual or country's ecological footprint should be. It also tends to underestimate
overall impacts and may overestimate the planet's carrying capacity, although it
remains a very useful tool, as Rees and Wackernagel argue:
USA
. . .9.6
France
. . .5.6
India
. . .0.8
Figure 9.1
National ecofootprints (to scale)
