URBP7005 Chap.5 Ecological Footprint and Green National Accounts
Ecological Footprint and Green National Accounts
Two responses to one complaint
Conventional welfare measures ignore the environmental dimension of welfare, and in some measures the effects of environmental damage are counted as positive, because pollution tends to raise consumption, investment and government spending. Two responses follow. Build a wholly new indicator, which is the ecological footprint route.
Or extend the accepted measure to take in the environmental dimension, which is the green accounting route.
What a footprint is, and what it is not
A footprint is the quantity of productive land and water a population needs, at the technology of the day, to grow everything it uses and to soak up everything it throws away.
It is an accounting of the past rather than a speculative estimate, and it rests on carrying capacity redefined as maximum load rather than maximum population, because average consumption per person has been rising faster than population.
It counts direct land, indirect land and embodied land, the last being area overseas used for goods imported for local consumption, which is why the result describes a population rather than a territory.
The published results
Supporting present consumption by the average Canadian takes at least 4.3 hectares, of which 2.3 hectares is for carbon dioxide assimilation alone, against a fair earthshare of 1.5 hectares.
Carried across to a city at the same rate, Vancouver was drawing on an area close to 180 times the size of the city itself, and beyond 200 times once the sea area behind its fish consumption is counted.
Japan and the Netherlands are estimated at roughly eight and fifteen times their domestic territories, which makes the point that global sustainability cannot be deficit financed, since not every region can be a net importer of biophysical capacity.
Cities both ways, and the accounting alternative
The required reading argues that cities cannot be sustainable by themselves and are a key to sustainability.
Concentration makes them responsible for the great majority of resource depletion and pollution; the same concentration gives cheaper infrastructure per person, more scope for reuse and recycling, less occupied land per person and scope to cut heating and vehicle energy.
The accounting route instead starts from net national product, which is what a country can consume in a period without eating into its capital, and shows that its correspondence with sustainable income breaks on four counts: incomplete categories, autonomous processes, revaluation, and imperfect markets and foresight.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Why a conventional output measure can rise with pollution
- 02
The footprint definition and the shift from population to load
- 03
Direct, indirect and embodied land
- 04
Global hectares, equivalence factors and yield factors
- 05
Published national, city and territorial results
- 06
Why global sustainability cannot be deficit financed
- 07
The concentration result and the leverage result
- 08
The urban sustainability multiplier
- 09
Net national product and the output sustainability correspondence
- 10
Four reasons the correspondence fails in practice
Read a footprint result without over-reading it
- 3State what the ratio does establish.
- 3Explain why it does not establish that the city causes the consumption.
- 3Give the counter-evidence on settlement form.
Key terms
- Ecological Footprint
- The productive land and water area a population requires to produce everything it consumes and absorb all its waste using prevailing technology, reported as an accounting of the past.
- Fair Earthshare
- The productive area available per person when the world's ecologically productive land is divided evenly among its population, used as the benchmark a footprint is compared against.
- Biocapacity
- The productive area a territory itself supplies, which a footprint result is set against to show whether a population lives within or beyond its own means.
- Equivalence Factor
- A conversion used to express hectares of one land type in global hectares, so that cropland, forest and fishing ground can be added together.
- Net National Product
- What a country can consume in a period without eating into its capital, equal to consumption plus net investment, and the measure that lines up with sustainable consumption under idealised conditions.
- Augmented Accounts
- National accounts extended to include omitted nonmarket consumption and investment, such as forests, fisheries, aquifers, home production and human capital.
- Urban Sustainability Multiplier
- The claim that because of systems linkages, seriously addressing a single issue in a city stimulates change in many related factors.
Ecological Footprint and Green National Accounts FAQ
What does an ecological footprint result actually license me to say?
That a population's consumption requires a stated productive area, expressed in a unit that allows comparison with other populations and with available capacity. It does not license a claim that a settlement form caused the consumption, and it does not contain a policy.
Its own authors put conceptual simplicity first among its strengths, and are explicit that a great many of the consumption effects charged to cities have nothing to do with what a city is like.
If cities have huge footprints, why does the reading call them a key to sustainability?
Because concentration cuts both ways. The same density that makes a city a node of consumption gives lower cost per person for piped water, sewerage, waste collection and most infrastructure, greater scope for recycling, reuse and remanufacturing together with the skills to do it, less occupied land per person, and real scope to cut energy for heating and for vehicle travel.
The argument is that a city is where a single intervention moves the most other variables.
Why has green accounting not replaced conventional national accounts?
Because completing the accounts is a long programme rather than a correction. Bringing in the missing items would mean valuing consumption that never passes through a market, such as work done at home; environmental services consumed directly; investment outside the market, such as movements in the value of resource stocks; and spending that builds human capital.
The reading also names four reasons the correspondence between a net product measure and sustainable income breaks down even in principle, so the gap is conceptual as well as practical.
Assessment move
Find a published footprint figure for the city you are writing about, then write down three sentences: what it measures, what it is being compared against, and what it does not establish. If you cannot find one, say so and use the method as a frame instead. The most common error in papers on this topic is treating the footprint as a verdict on a settlement rather than as an accounting of a population.
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