As humanity continues to grow, it has a greater impact on the environment. To measure this impact, scientists measure Biocapacity, which is the planet’s productive land areas such as forests and pastures, and the Ecological Footprint, which is the area needed to support the human population. When the latter exceeds the former, the environment has a net loss, also called an overshoot. “Since the 1970s, humanity has been in ecological overshoot with annual demand on resources exceeding what Earth can regenerate each year” (“Footprint Basics,” 2016). Therefore, it is important to understand not only your country’s Biocapacity and Ecological Footprint but also your own individual impact.
America’s Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity are shown below. The green line on the bottom shows the productive areas and the red line top shows how much American’s use to sustain themselves. The gap between the two is the overshoot. As can be seen, biocapacity of the US remains relatively the same, with only a slight decrease, whereas the Ecological Footprint varies over time as the national policies, technology advancements, consumption patterns, etc. vary from year to year. For comparison, the United Kingdom’s data is also added below. Their biocapacity is much smaller, as they are a smaller country, but it has increased slightly over time. Their overshoot, however, is much larger than the US’s. An important aspect to not in both is that recent years have shown an overall decline in the overshoot.
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My own data is shown below. According to the calculator at footprintnetwork.org, my lifestyle requires 23.6 global acres to sustain, which means that if everyone else on the planet lived like I did five times as much Biocapacity as the Earth currently provides, my exact Ecological Footprint being 5.3 Earths. This means, of course, that I contribute to the collective overshoot. My Footprint largely comes from transportation and various services, whereas somewhat surprisingly food and shelter are relatively small, as I expected them to be larger. The main contributor to this is the amount of energy land my lifestyle needs, which vastly outweighs the other categories. If I am going to make a change in lifestyle, this is the best place to start.
Looking at these calculators, it is clear that my lifestyle needs to change. Below are the changes I have decided that I will make. These include eating fewer animal-based foods, eating more locally grown foods, eating food that have undergone less processing, reducing the amount I drive my car, traveling less by plane, and coordinating with friends and family in carpools. The foods that I eat take a lot of land, as do the all of the industries supporting the food industry. This is especially true for the production of animal-based food. Transporting food also saps a large amount of biocapacity and it is largely unnecessary to eat food from far away. Processed food also consumes a large amount of biocapacity, which like everything above, can be easily reduced. Traveling, of course, requires a lot of resources, such as fuel production, metal production, rubber production, etc. Using my car and flying less can help reduce my contribution to the overshoot. If I do these things, this reduces the amount the global acres needed to support my lifestyle from 23.6 to 17.9, meaning that the amount of Earth’s to support the human population if everyone lived like I do from 5.3 down to 4. Even though it still makes me part of the overshoot, it is a good start. In the future, I will have to do more and be more conscious of my impact on the planet.
- Data and Results. (2016, June 06). Retrieved from Global Footprint Network: Advancing the Science of Sustainability, Global Footprint Network
- Footprint Basics. (2016, April 11). Retrieved from Global Footprint Network: Advancing the Science of Sustainability, Global Footprint Network
- Personal Footprint. (2016, November 20). Retrieved from Global Footprint Network: Advancing the Science of Sustainability, Global Footprint Network
