Have you got big feet?

Tonight I went to the Community Environment Network’s Network meeting. Over 50 people from a variety of environmental groups and local council were there to share their current projects and hear Associate Professor Glenn Albrecht talk about Ecological Footprints, and it was a great talk. Here are some of the notes I took from the night

Our ecological footprint is a way we can measure the load imposed by people on nature. It represents the land area necessary to sustain current levels of resource consumption and waste discharge by that population.

The Ecological Footprint is gaining global acceptance as ‘The Tool’ to measure sustainability because it is a concept that people can understand. Ways of measuring sustainability in the past have created confusion, mixed economic with environmental, have not been able to be applied generically around the globe and just weren’t user friendly.

The indicator of a good indicator is that it should tell you where you are with enough information that you can make informed decisions to respond to the that information. Just like the fuel gauge when its hovering below the empty line, you know you have to get petrol…and soon.

The ecological footprint is an indicator of a population’s current and projected level of resource use. It compares the renewable resources consumed and available to a population, individual, city, organisation or region with the waste that is produce as global hectares/person.

The ecological footprint is the sustainability equivalent of the GDP and All Ords Index only what it is measuring is the human relationship to the environment.

The Ecological Footprint (EF) is an easy to understand equation

The Ecological Footprint equals the biological productivity from land and water required to produce all goods and services that are consumed minus all the waste .

The Ecological Footprint is measured in global hectares which is a productivity weighted area used to report both the biocapacity of the earth, and the demand on biocapacity.

The Ecological Footprint shows who’s using the resources, in what proportion and which activities are using them, so it’s a very handy educational tool.

If all of the world’s population had an equitable share of the available resources and their use the ecological footprint would be 1.8 biological productive hectares per person. But this isn’t how it is.

For the Sydney region the ecological footprint is 8ha/person. If everybody lived by these standards we would need 3-4 planets to survive. In Bangladesh the ecological footprint is 0.5ha/person, at this rate the planet could support 22 billion people.

I did the Ecological Footprint quiz and found out my footprint is 3.9 global hectares. The average Aussie footprint is 7.6 global hectares. If everyone lived like me we’d need 2.2 planets to sustain ourselves.

The real surprise though was how I was making the most impact and it was my food. By eating meat a couple of times a week it made a huge difference. It was a really quick quiz, it only took a couple of minutes, and it gave me a really great insight into how I can make a difference.

The Greens are about treading lightly on the planet all of our polices reflect concerns for the global sustainability of our actions. It’s great to be a part of an organisation that cares about the cumulative impacts of all the small decisions we make every day.