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Ecological Footprint

Ecological Footprint is a resource management tool that measures the impact of human activity on the nature. By extension, it can also measure the environmental impact of products. This tool evaluates the productive surface needed for a person, a product or a population to satisfy its consumption and waste absorption needs. The ecological footprint is measured in "unities-surface". One unity-surface is one productive hectare.
Five big consumption categories are considered: food, housing, transport, woods and services. The annual consumption of these categories including waste discharges and water allows to know, thanks to specific coefficients, the corresponding surface. Many different conversion factors are freely available.
The ecological footprint can be considered as an indicator that allows to aggregate in one result different dimensions and to compare different projects and actions. It does not take in consideration certain impacts, such as biodiversity degradation, which can be estimated by other measures and included in the final result.

Information

Source

http://www.footprintnetwork.org (English)

http://www.empreinte-ecologique.com/index.html (French)

Remarks

Ecological footprint is also a tool for awareness raising. The first awareness raising campaign was organised in France by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The concept of footprint accounts functioning like bank statements, is one easily understandable for a general audience: are we living within our ecoolgical budget, or overspending? Ecological footprint relates to ecological labels or CO2 footprint (which only measures the emission of gases causing climate change).

Purpose - verification