Imagine a glass done over your city, town, village, what area would this dome have to cover to ensure that the population could maintain their current lifestyles using only the bio productive space within the dome. People in such a place would more than likely cease to function and its inhabitants would perish within days.  The population and the economy contained by the dome would have been cut off from vital resources and essential waste sinks, leaving it both to starve and to suffocate at the same time. The ecosystems contained within this human terrarium would have insufficient carrying capacity to support the ecological load imposed by the contained human population. This rational image of a contained hemisphere reminds us of humankinds continuing ecological vulnerability.

 

Governments, regional assemblies and local authorities are now engaging with the ecological footprint to help measure progress towards sustainable development and to inform policy.  Wales first had its first footprint published by Best Foot Forward[1] in 2002 and the Welsh government are now using the ecological footprint as a sustainable indicator.

 

It can be used for at a number of levels, including; Global, Country, Local Authority, Business, Household and Individual.  Europe, Scottish & Welsh Parliaments, S.W. England, FA Cup 2004, Olympics 2012 and London have all had their footprints calculated or as for the Olympics it is part of the bid for a sustainable games, London is committed to developing eco-footprint models for sport events to provide a benchmark for future events and as a means of tracking the Olympic organising committees progress.

 

The ecological footprint is becoming a useful tool in grasping a true understanding of sustainability while informing as an indicator sustainable performance in so doing this it will have the potential to inform statutory and non-statutory local authority policy making, impacting on scenario planning for sustainable development.

 

The ecological footprint is not confined to buildings and architecture, but holistically regards all human activities.  View from an architectural perspective, infrastructure, transportation, communications and services (healthcare, education, etc) are all indirectly attached to every building to some degree.

 

The following information is my interpretation of the UK’s ecological footprint that has been carried out for the Department of Transport in a report “Providing a tool for measuring sustainability of local authorities” published by Stockholm Environment Institute 2003.  This example will show the calculation behind the footprint; it will however not cover every computation but will offer a transparent understanding as to how it all works.

 

 

Data sources and analysis

There are many sources used for this analysis, some are used extensively across components, in particular the raw data spreadsheet used to calculate the compound ecological footprint of the UK which was prepared as part of the WWF Living Planet Report 2002:

 

A UK population figure of 58,974,000 has been used.[2]

 

British Petroleum. 2001. Statistical Review of World Energy 2001. See www.bp.com/centres/energy/world_stat_rev/index.asp

 

Eurostat. 2000. Towards Environmental Pressure Indicators for the EU. European

Commission.

 

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). 2001. FAOSTAT 2001 CDROM

(FAO Statistical Databases). FAO, Rome, Italy, or see http://apps.fao.org

 

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). 2000a. Forest Resource

Assessment 2000. FAO Forestry Department, Rome, Italy.

 

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). 2000b. FISHSTAT Plus.

FAO Fisheries Department, Rome, Italy.

 

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). 1997b. State of the World’s

Forests 1997. FAO, Rome, Italy.

 

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). 1995. World Livestock Production Systems: Current status, issues and trends. FAO, Rome, Italy.

 

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)/United Nations Economic

Commission for Europe (UNECE). 2000. Temperate and Boreal Forest Resource Assessment

2000. UNECE/FAO, Geneva, Switzerland.