These insights will make you understand how severe human resource consumption really is
During the last years environmental protection and a more conscious look at how we consume natural resources became increasingly important in public discussion and even sparked a new international movement of Youth Activism.
The discussion is mainly centred around CO2 emissions and the corresponding carbon footprint, however there’s a more holistic approach to it: The Ecological Footprint. It provides an overarching perspective that can reveal spill-over effects, e.g. when does reducing demand in one area lead to an increase in demand elsewhere. For example, will shifting from fossil fuels to biomass fuels decrease or increase humanity’s overall demand on the planet’s biological capacity? Would increasing the use of biomass fuels be more or less effective than returning cropland to forest cover?
The Global Footprint Network (GFN) develops and promotes tools for advancing sustainability, including ecological footprint and biocapacity, which measure the amount of resources we use and how much we have. Originally GFN is an independent think tank and provides an extensive database which you can checkout in my project notebook and Github repository.
How is the Ecological Footprint calculated?
The Ecological Footprint is derived by tracking how much biologically productive area it takes to provide for all the competing demands of people.
These demands include space for food growing, fibre production, timber regeneration, absorption of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning, and accommodating built infrastructure. A country’s consumption is calculated by adding imports to and subtracting exports from its national production.
“The ecological footprint is a sustainability indicator that not only quantifies the CO2 balance but also qualitatively represents the land requirement to absorb CO2.” (Bund Naturschutz Leipzig)
What types of footprint are there and how have they developed over time
The human footprint can be broken down into 6 Levers according to the GFN:
- Grazing land is used to raise livestock for meat, dairy, hide, and wool products.
- Forest land provides for two services: The forest product Footprint, which is calculated based on the amount of lumber, pulp, timber products, and fuel wood consumed by a country on a yearly basis. It also used to offset the Carbon Footprint, which represents the carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels.
- Fishing Grounds is calculated based on estimates of the maximum sustainable catch for a variety of fish species.
- Cropland is the most bioproductive of all the land-use types and consists of areas used to produce food and fiber for human consumption, feed for livestock, oil crops, and rubber.
- Built-up Land is calculated based on the area of land covered by human infrastructure — transportation, housing, industrial structures, and reservoirs for hydropower. Built-up land may occupy what would previously have been cropland.
- Carbon Footprint measures CO2 emissions associated with fossil fuel use. In the footprint accounts, these amounts are converted into biologically productive areas necessary for absorbing this CO2. The carbon Footprint is added to the Ecological Footprint because it is a competing use of bioproductive space, since increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is considered to represent a build-up of ecological debt
All data and charts shown here is based on the data of the Global Footprint Accounts and World Bank.
In the first part of below’s chart we can observe that especially carbon footprint and the need for crop land has increased significantly over time. The black line is earth’s biocapacity which has been surpassed in 1970. Also let’s have a look at the ten countries which provide almost 70% of Earth’s Biocapacity: Brazil, China and the United States are among the TOP 3 scoring high on Forest and Crop Land. You might think that carbon is missing here but as a matter of Carbon Emissions — unlike the other levers — can not be part of biocapacity.
What about ecological deficit and surplus?
Based on the differential of biocapacity and ecological footprint/consumption it is possible to calculate a deficit or surplus. If we look at the aggregated data we can see that since 1970 the world is in a large deficit. As seen above this is largely due to the footprint increase in Crop Land and Carbon.
This can also be seen if we look at development over time: In the 1960s almost 70% of countries were ecological creditors, a relationship which was reversed in 2014 with only 30% of countries being creditors.
If we look at the ten largest debtors and creditors we can see that China as well as the US and India are among the largest debtors, with Brazil, Canada and Russia being creditors however not being able to make up for the TOP3 debtors by far.
If we put this into relative context, so to say the quotient of surplus/deficit to biocapacity we can see that especially the middle eastern countries, China and Japan score poorly .
If we then break this down to a per capita view we can see that the US, Japan and Saudi Arabia score very poorly.
What about Carbon Dioxide?
Clearly we have seen in the first part of this article that increasing emission of Carbon Dioxide is one of the most severe components of biological footprint. Let’s have a closer look and try to break down CO2 emissions based on the sectors the International Energy Agency provides:
From 1960 to 2014 the CO2 emissions for the three largest sectors grew as follows:
- Electricity and Heat production factor ~7
- Transport by factor ~4
- Manufacturing, Industries and Production by factor ~3
Now let’s have a look at the correlation matrix using a multitude of variables on electricity production sources as well as GDP per capita:
This matrix correlates each variable with the others and color-codes the coefficient (dark shades mean little to no correlation, light means strong to fully linear correlation).
What we can observe is that GDP per capita and CO2 emissions per capita show a strong correlation of 0.8. Considering that GDP is a measure for a country’s economic output we can cautiously postulate that the more economically “successful” a country is the more CO2 it will emit.
But what is the driving force behind this relationship? We can observe that GDP per capita and power consumption (kWh per capita) correlate with 0.8 as well. Hence, let’s have a look at how the biggest ecological debtors (as above mentioned) generate energy:
Clearly most of the countries produce energy with fossil-based types of production: Either coal, natural gas or oil. Unfortunately carbon-friendly alternatives such as renewable sources, hydroelectric or nuclear (with the latter having also substantial disadvantages) are less present in the energy mix.
Conclusions
So what are the three main takeaways of this?
1. The ecological footprint data by the Global Footprint Network could be harnessed for the internalisation of environmental costs globally
The data and concepts of the Footprint Network are a valuable source for societal and political discussion. How ecologically sustainable is a country at the moment? Should we subsidise the transition of poorer but emerging countries towards greener electricity production based on a fund where richer countries’ financial contributions reflect their ecological deficit? The concept is well suited to provide more guidance on such questions.
2. Energy and heat production is a significant driver of CO2 emissions with major ecological debtors energy production being skewed towards fossil-based production types
Currently, CO2 emissions will increase with economic activity/output being the major goal of most of modern societies. The promise of increased welfare for billions of people in emerging markets through economic rise has a major downside: With electricity production being mainly fossil-based, this promise will inevitably lead to more CO2 emissions. An energy revolution will be of paramount importance increasing the penetration of renewable energy sources at scale. In that context modern nuclear electricity generation (e.g. new reactor types currently developed by Bill Gates’s TerraPower) could be considered a viable option.
3. The earth has been in an ecological deficit for long time and the ecological footprint provides a more holistic scheme to analyse it
The data clearly shows that mankind has been consuming more natural resources than provided since the 1970s with an increasing deficit which is now twice the resources Earth provides. The concept of ecological footprint with the use of a single comparable measure helps to understand the development of underlying layers over time and provides more transparency into trade-offs such as using forest/crop land for friendly bio fuel.
