Therefore, the proposed approach would allow to add or delete variables in order to reflect local socio-environmental conditions. Furthermore, the approach could be applied also in case of a lack of designated areas for the development of new residential areas according to planning documents.
The use of environmental zones in the ECC assessment could be preceded or implemented to appraise the best location for residential development based on such features as elevation, slopes, the proximity of rivers or protected areas, etc. The implementation of environmental zones together with the ECC approach would support a more sustainable development of the city Kazak, On the one hand, it would allow the allocation of land use for housing purposes by combining the planned allocation of land use in the planning documents with ecological zones, and on the other the quantification of ECC using BC and CF, as well as the surface of natural areas needed for the assimilation of humanity CF.
The implementation of environmental carrying capacity together with environmental zones would allow to increase the biodiversity and natural potential of the area, as well as decrease the human impact on the environment.
The implementation of environmental zones for spatial management process could also be a base for spatial conflict verification, which could be understood as a designation of new residential areas on areas providing ecosystem services as good-quality soils, areas of nature protection forms or within their buffer zones or on areas vulnerable to flood.
Such spatial decision could decrease the natural potential of an area and reduce the quality of life of residents. Some of the data can be obtained by contacting the authors. SS: resources, writing—review and editing, visualization, and supervision. JK: resources, writing—review and editing, supervision, and funding acquisition. All authors: contributed to the article and approved the submitted version. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
We would like to thank Global Footprint Network, especially David Lin, for data sharing, all guidelines and previous cooperation which allowed to realize our following research as research provided to Frontiers. Baabou, W. The ecological footprint of mediterranean cities: awareness creation and policy implications. Policy 69, 94— Scieki oczyszczone w ciagu roku. Treatment of municipal sewage.
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That number is easily converted to acres per pound. Data on our per-capita consumption of each foodstuff in pounds is also available. The per-capita area required for each foodstuff is then calculated by multiplying these two figures. The sum of the resulting areas is our per-capita food footprint. Similarly, our annual U. This sounds trivial, but that area cannot be reused until it has regrown.
On average, this takes about 40 years. Thus the estimated area of forest that must be dedicated to each one of us to sustain our present level of wood products consumption — our wood products footprint -- is about 1.
Our U. Therefore, the total ecological footprint for the average American is a minimum of about 3. Lets put this in perspective.
Earth has about 22 billion acres of ecologically productive land. This is comprised of about 3. Not all of the arable land is of high quality, and improving agricultural productivity by use of fertilizers and insecticides, or shifting to monocultural forestry, affects ecosystems in other, often deleterious, ways. Expansion of land use in any of those categories can only be done at the expense of one of the other categories, and development of the land for human structures of all kinds competes for this same area.
If we maintain our current footprint and the human population of estimated at 9 billion reaches consumption levels similar to ours, which is a practical goal for the developing world, humanity would need For humans alone, excluding the needs of other organisms, there is not that much land available simply by considering these three computable sorts of personal footprints!
Furthermore, the food footprint calculations cited above used U. If global yields were used in those calculations, our food footprints would be closer to 3 acres. Each year more of our most productive farmland is buried under human structures, and both good and marginal farmland becomes unusable due to poor farming practices, so even the estimate of a sustainable carrying capacity of 4 billion people eating and living as we do may be high.
The simple calculations cited above should raise some warning flags that humanity already has a problem with the demands we make on Earth. And we seem to be continuing our present course unabated! Refinement of footprint and carrying capacity figures should be an ongoing part of the process of evaluating and monitoring the sustainability of the human enterprise.
Have students estimate their annual consumption, in pounds, of various non-meat food items that they eat most often beans, corn, potatoes, apples, etc. Using a common unit, i. Equivalence factors are used to convert physical hectares of different types of land, such as cropland and pasture, into the common unit of global hectares. As with any calculation system, Footprint accounts are subject to uncertainty in source data, calculation parameters, and methodological decisions.
Exact error bars or standard errors for calculations have not been rigorously compiled, and no full, comprehensive, and quantitative estimate of uncertainty has yet been carried out.
Several organizations, including Global Footprint Network, are seeking to allocate resources towards obtaining more accurate estimates of this nature. These data sets are official, widely obtainable, and are available in a consistent format across nations, allowing comparisons to be made between countries. The data are taken at face value, except where a substantial error is apparent and recognized widely by the research community for example, historical fisheries catch distortions or jumps of two orders of magnitude in trade flows for a single year.
Global Footprint Network encourages national governments, statistical offices, and research organizations to participate in collaborative reviews of data quality and methodology. Like other accounting systems, such as the Systems of National Accounts and GDP, Ecological Footprint accounts build on a single, clearly defined research question, and attempt to provide the best possible objective, transparent, and scientific answer to this question. The process of initially defining a research question inherently involves normative judgments about which questions are important to pursue.
Once a research question is identified, however, answering it is a scientific process. Ecological Footprint accounts do not say anything about what should be, or what any person or group of people should do. No normative or opinion-based judgments or weighting factors enter into Ecological Footprint accounting methodology. For example, the equivalence factors that allow different land types to be aggregated in the common unit of global hectares are based on empirical measurements of productivity.
As an organization, Global Footprint Network does not engage in environmental advocacy other than to suggest that the maintenance of accurate ecological accounts has an important role to play in decision making.
At the national level, Global Footprint Network maintains the National Footprint Accounts, which provide benchmark Ecological Footprint results for nations from This carbon footprint, typically measured in tonnes of carbon dioxide, is an initial step towards calculating a full carbon Footprint, which in turn is one piece of the total Ecological Footprint.
A carbon Footprint translates tonnes of carbon dioxide released into the demand this places on biological capacity, measured in terms of the total area, in global hectares, required to sequester these carbon emissions. The Ecological Footprint of a biological resource represents the amount of biologically productive land and water area required to produce that material. Ecosystems simply do not create water in the same manner as timber, fish, or fiber products.
As a result, the Footprint of a given quantity of water cannot be calculated with yield values in the same manner as a quantity of crop or wood product. A water footprint can also be calculated based on the area of catchments or recharge zone needed to supply a given quantity of water. The area obtained from this calculation, however, cannot be added to other Ecological Footprint land areas, as this would create double counting a forest, for example, can be used for both timber production and as a water catchment, but adding these two values together would count the amount of forest available twice.
Ecological Footprint accounts do directly reflect the influence of water availability on the biocapacity of ecosystems. Estimates of the amount of biocapacity that is dependent on freshwater supply, or of the lost capacity associated with water use for non-bioproductive purposes, could be calculated. As the relationship between freshwater and biological capacity is highly site specific, this analysis would need to be completed at a regional or local scale on a case-by-case basis.
Toxics and pollutants released from the human economy that cannot in any way be absorbed or broken down by biological processes, such as many types of plastics, cannot be directly assigned an Ecological Footprint. As the Ecological Footprint measures the area required to produce a material or absorb carbon dioxide emissions, materials such as mercury that are not created by biological processes nor absorbed by biological systems do not have a defined Ecological Footprint although their extraction, processing, and transport may have an associated carbon Footprint , for example.
Many of the most important concerns surrounding toxic materials, such as future storage risks and human health impacts, are best captured by indicators other than the Ecological Footprint. Many of these materials can cause damage to ecosystems when they are released into the environment, however, and this resultant loss of biocapacity can be measured using Ecological Footprint accounting and allocated to the activity that caused the release of the pollutant.
The relationships between pollution and ecosystem damage are very site specific, data intensive, and difficult to calculate in practice. Even if no specific calculation is undertaken, however, any loss of biocapacity associated with the release of pollutants will be reflected in future assessments of the affected area. One tonne of copper thus does not have an Ecological Footprint in the same way as one tonne of timber, which requires bioproductive area for its creation. There is, however, an Ecological Footprint associated with the energy and other materials used in extracting, refining, processing, and shipping these mineral resources, and together these are often reported as the Footprint of the mineral.
Additionally, when mined materials such as mercury or arsenic enter the environment, they may cause damage and a loss of productivity. The Footprint of carbon released from the combustion of fossil fuels is thus defined as the amount of productive area required to sequester the carbon dioxide emissions and prevent its accumulation.
An alternative method would be to calculate the consumption of fossil fuels according to the productive area required to regenerate them, which would result in a carbon Footprint many hundreds of times higher than the current calculation.
The Ecological Footprint is not an indicator of the state of biodiversity, and the impact of a particular activity or process on biodiversity does not directly affect the Ecological Footprint calculation for that activity. These two practices will have very different consequences for the available future capacity of the forest to produce timber, which would be reflected in future biocapacity assessments but not in current Ecological Footprint accounts. Although not a direct measure of biodiversity, the Ecological Footprint supports biodiversity assessment and conservation in two important ways.
First, the Ecological Footprint can be used as a large scale indicator of the underlying drivers or pressures that cause biodiversity loss. In addition, the Ecological Footprint can also be used to translate the consumption of a given quantity of material such as one kilogram of paper into the specific local land area from which it was harvested such as one square meter of forest in Finland.
After this initial translation, complementary indicators and assessment tools can be used to measure the impact on biodiversity associated with harvesting from that ecosystem. Nuclear power has been included as a separate footprint component in national Footprint calculations since Because it is difficult to calculate the extent of the nuclear demand on the biosphere, it was assumed that one unit of nuclear electricity had an equivalent Footprint to one unit of electricity produced with a world average mix of fossil fuels.
This change has been implemented in the edition of the National Footprint Accounts. The National Accounts Committee concluded that the emissions proxy approach for calculating the Footprint of nuclear electricity was not scientifically sound because:.
Actual carbon emissions associated with nuclear electricity are included in the National Footprint Accounts. However these emissions are only one among many environmental considerations relevant to nuclear power. Therefore, for most nations, the effect of this methodological change on their results reported here will negligible. However, for countries with significant nuclear power supply such as Belgium, Finland, France, Japan, Sweden and Switzerland, the method change influenced their national Footprint values to a greater extent.
This exclusion of the nuclear Footprint component does not reflect a stance on nuclear energy. It simply acknowledges that only some aspects of nuclear energy are easily measured in terms of demand on regenerative capacity, the research question addressed by the Ecological Footprint.
However, the Living Planet Report—Japan for included an estimate for the biocapacity implications of the Fukushima accident.
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