Introduction

Shifting the global economy towards sustainability

Making Money Our Servant Rather Than Our Master

Right Livelihood

Social enterprise

Legal and Financial Issues

“What is 120 times the size of London?  The answer: the land or ecological footprint required to supply London’s needs.” – Herbert Giradet

Ecological Impacts

Ecological footprinting is a tool for translating resource use and the generation of waste into the common denominator of bio-productive land, measured in Global Hectares (Gha.).  Much of the educational power of this tool is its capacity to compare how much bio-productive land exists on the planet with how much we are actually using. 

Global ecological footprint studies suggest that in the mid-1980s, we moved into ‘overshoot’, meaning that levels of consumption exceeded the ability of natural systems to self-regenerate; we started to consume more natural wealth then was created every year.  Today, as members of the human family, we are, on average, using 2.3 Gha. Of bioproductive land to satisfy our various needs compared to around 1.7 Gha. that is available per capita. In short, we are consuming at a level around one third greater than natural systems are able to sustain (Chambers et al. 2001).

A useful way to think of this is that after the mid-1980s, we moved beyond just consuming the interest on natural capital and began to eat into the capital itself. 

There are, of course, huge variations both between and within countries.  While most countries in the world have consumption levels well within the global sustainable footprint (1.7 Gha.), the populations of the richer industrialised countries currently live far beyond their means.  If all humans had a lifestyle similar to the West European average, we would need three planets to sustain ourselves.  A US lifestyle for all humans would require five and a half planets.

This increase in the size of humanity’s footprint lies at the root of the various ecological crises that we face.  The most serious and imminent of these is climate change, resulting directly from the evolution of a global economy heavily dependent on the burning of fossil fuels.

However, finding an answer to this challenge through identifying a new energy source – a strategy that is at the top of the agenda for today’s political and economic elites – will hardly address the core problem.  This is that our numbers and the levels at which we are consuming are eating into the planet’s natural capital.  WWF’s Living Planet Index, that tracks populations of 1,313 vertebrate species - fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals - from all around the world, has found that the Index has dropped by 30% between 1990 and 2003, suggesting that the planet lost almost one third of its natural capital (WWF 2007).

Meanwhile, regular reports on fish stocks, the health of soils, rivers and lakes, depletion of aquifers, and rates of deforestation leave us in no doubt that we must reduce our footprint (Brown 2008).

• Tracing the Connections
• Ecological Impacts
• Social Impacts

‘Capital and interest’ from Sharing Nature's Interest (2000), Ecological Footprints as an Indicator of Sustainability (See bibliography)
Click on image for more info

UK’s ecological footprint, from New Economics Foundation, UK
Click on image to enlarge

Biodiversity indicators, from WWF
Click on image to enlarge