Chronic poor environmental practices have led to a degradation of the world's water, air and land as well as wasting of precious natural resources. Reducing these environmental impacts requires quantitative knowledge of social systems’ impacts on the ecological systems. So how do we know how much of an impact our lifestyles and individual actions have on the Earth’s natural systems?

The ecological footprint, of a person or population, is an estimation of the amount of biologically productive land and sea area needed by that living entity. The area provides and regenerates the resources that are consumed and absorb and render harmless the corresponding waste, assuming current technology and resource management practice. It also compares human demand with the Earth's ecological capacity to regenerate it.

Background on Ecological Footprint

Conceived in 1990 and published in 1992 by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees at the University of British Columbia, the ecological footprint uses a a resource accounting method similar to Life Cycle Analysis. It tracks the consumption of energy, water and other materials (food, fiber) for each activity the entity does, and converts it into a normalized measure of land area called 'global hectares' (gha). The method uses a set of standards, which are in turn based on data collated through various collaborative efforts between academia, government, NGOs and consulting firms.

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