About environmental footprinting

A key tool in measuring which street is the ‘greenest’ (i.e. the most environmentally sustainable) is environmental footprinting.  Footprinting is a means of quantifying the impact on the environment of an individuals lifestyle. Expressed another way, it is about finding out how much of the world’s capacity to produce food, water, energy, goods and services, and to also absorb the wastes that arise from these an individual personally takes up.

Environmental footprint results are expressed in two different ways:

• Global hectares (gHa). A global hectare is a hectare of the Earth’s surface of average productivity.
• Earths which expresses the total number of Planet Earth’s needed if everyone in the world had the same environmental footprint (i.e. lifestyle and consumption habits) as the person taking the quiz.

Environmental Footprint National Averages (From Center of Sustainable Economy)

A table of environmental footprints for selected countries is given below. As it can be seen there are huge differences between countries.

The average global environmental footprint is 1.5 Earths, meaning we are presently overshooting and undermining the Earth’s capacity to support us. 

The global average footprint needs to be less than one Earth to be environmentally sustainable.  Using a financial analogy, being environmentally sustainable means we can live indefinitely off the interest of the world’s natural capital, rather than spending that capital in a burst of activity that leads to Planet Earth going bankrupt.

By definition all unsustainable activities come to an end. The choice before us as a species is whether we choose to end them on our own terms thereby avoiding or at least minimising harmful consequences, or leave it to chance and risk total catastrophe.