Refining the ecological footprint

Abstract

The ecological footprint measures how much of the biosphere’s annual regenerative capacity is required to renew the natural resources used by a defined population in a given year. Ecological footprint analysis (EFA) compares the footprint with biocapacity. Despite increasing popularity of EFA, definitional, theoretical, and methodological issues hinder more widespread scientific acceptance and use in policy settings. Of particular concern are how EFA is defined and what it actually measures, exclusion of open oceans and less productive lands from biocapacity accounts, failure to allocate space for other species, use of agricultural productivity potential as the basis for equivalence factors, how the global carbon budget is allocated, and failure to capture unsustainable use of aquatic or terrestrial ecosystems.