Your ecological footprint is an estimate of the biologically productive land required to support your current lifestyle, according to Global Footprint Network. The organizations that run ecological footprint calculators want to spur individuals to change their lifestyle and advocate for change on a systemic level. Some organizations also calculate ecological footprints for businesses, governments, national populations and other groups.
Significance
The Sustainable Scale Project finds that there are 11.2 billion hectares of biologically productive land and sea on Earth. This leaves less than two hectares for each person as of 2010. The Sustainable Scale Project cites the 2004 Living Planet Report which indicated that the actual usage is equivalent to an average ecological footprint of 2.2 hectares per person, which represents more than 20% overshoot.
Overshooting
The term "overshoot" is short for ecological overshoot and describes when a population's demand on an ecosystem is more than that ecosystem can bear and still regenerate the resources it uses and process its waste. Over time, overshooting depletes and can even destroy the population's ecosystem.
Measurement
Your ecological footprint considers factors such as housing, consumer goods, transportation, waste disposal and eating. For each factor, the amount of resources you consume is divided by the yield of the land or sea area from which that resource was harvested, calculating a number of hectares. The sum of the hectares needed to support your consumption and waste disposal is your ecological footprint. Your ecological footprint is also expressed in terms of how many Earths it would take support the global population, without causing major ecosystem damage, if everyone consumed as much as you.
Time Frame
Redefining Progress explains that the ecological footprint considers only the present and past years, because we can use available data on consumption levels, biological production, technology and standards of living. The ecological footprint is different from the population term "carrying capacity," which speculates how many people the planet could hold in the future without permanent ecosystem damage.
Limitations
The Sustainable Scale Project asserts that the ecological footprint underestimates the impact of human activities in the biosphere, because it focuses on renewable resources such as wood, food, and water. Non-renewable resources, with the partial exception of fossil fuels, are not accounted for. The Sustainable Scale Project also notes that measuring global hectares is productive when looking at global footprints, but many local ecosystems have different biological productivity rates that aren't considered. Furthermore, the ecological footprint does not consider the effect of different ecosystems within different types of land such as cropland and forests, which would affect the biological productivity of the land.
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