Ecological Footprint Approach
Ecological footprint accounting, based on the biological concept of carrying capacity, tracks the amount of land and water area a human population, needed to produce the resources the population consumes and to absorb its waste, under prevailing technology. This amount then is compared to available biocapacity, in the world or in that region. The biocapacity represents the area able to regenerate resources and assimilate waste. Global Footprint Network publishes every year results for all nations captured in UN statistics.
The algorithms of ecological footprint accounts have been used in combination with the emergy methodology (S. Zhao, Z. Li and W. Li 2005), and a sustainability index has been derived from the latter. They have also been combined with a measure of quality of life, for instance through the "Happy Planet Index" (HPI) calculated for 178 nations (Marks et al., 2006). The Happy Planet Index calculates how many happy life years each country is able to generate per global hectare of ecological footprint.
One of the striking conclusions to emerge from ecological footprint accounting is that it would be necessary to have 4 or 5 back-up planets engaged in nothing but agriculture for all those alive today to live a western lifestyle. The Footprint analysis is closely related to the I = PAT equation that, itself, can be considered a metric.
Read more about this topic: Sustainability Metrics And Indices, Metrics and Indices
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—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.”
—Arthur S. Eddington (1882–1944)
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