Definition of Ecological Footprint

Archive for the ‘Calculating Ecological Footprint’ Category

There are many steps in calculating Ecological Footprint. Below is an outline of how to Calculate Ecological Footprint.

Step 1: Calculate the average person’s annual consumption of a particular item

To calculate the annual consumption of a person within a population, look for aggregate data or statistical information for the entire region. Divide the total consumption by the population size. Alternatively you can try estimating the annual consumption by hand but it is much more time consuming and you are likely to miss some. You need to include anything consumed or used such as food, water, energy, forest products, etc. However, if you use the national statistics and census, remember to adjust for imports and exports. The unit of the average annual consumption (denoted by C in economics) is kg per capita.

Step 2: Calculate the land area for the production of each major consumption item

Since Ecological Footprinting is about calculating land and natural resources used, the next step is to estimate the land area per capita used or needed for the production of each major consumption item. To calculate this, divide average annual consumption of that item (from the mathematical equation above) by its average annual productivity or yield. The unit of the land needed to product item i is hectare per capita or ha/capita.

Each person, of course, consumes and uses many natural resources so the number of “i” that needs to be calculated is very large. However, you can simplify the process of calculating Ecological Footprint by categorizing ‘i’ in major categories that have statistical information provided by national surveys or governmental data such as dividing all the different consumption categories into food, housing, transportation, consumer goods and services.

You can calculate Ecological Footprint of any place, any country, any city, any economy or for anyone and anything in the world. Although you can calculate Ecological Footprint using mathematical equations to estimate the amount of natural resource consumptions of any country, economy, village, land, or population. 

Bear in mind that there are different ways to calculate Ecological Footprint and while the Definition of Ecological Footprint may be universal throughout the world, the methods of how to calculate Ecological Footprint vary from country to country, institution to institution, etc. There are many theories of how to calculate Ecological Footprint and below are some ways of Calculating Ecological Footprint that are currently used.

How to calculate Ecological Footprint?

To calculate Ecological Footprint of anything is to estimate or calculate how much land and water area is needed regularly by that population to: 

• produce all the goods consumed, and
• absorb all the wastes generated

As you can see this is a broad definition of how to calculate Ecological Footprint because there are countless categories of goods consumed by the population and there is also a large list of wastes generated. If you were to write all the types of goods consumed by a population down as well as all the wastes they generate, the list will go on and on. You would need a supercomputer to compute and assimilate all the data necessary to calculate Ecological Footprint accurately. 

Since our technology is not up to calculate everything we can think of precisely, the best we can do to calculate Ecological Footprint is to estimate Ecological Footprint based on reasonable assumptions that make sense in the real world with real life applications. 

Ecological Footprint calculation

An Ecological Footprint calculation is a multi step process. Each step of the Ecological Footprint calculation has assumptions and error factors so you need to be very precise and thorough when Calculating Ecological Footprint. See Calculating Ecological Footprint. Calculating Ecological Footprint is a long, complicated and involved process that starts with calculating the Ecological Footprint of a person within a country or economy.