Ecological Footprinting

I read Ella Lawton's paper submission on her New Zealand Footprint project.  I had another look over the notes I took when she spoke to us during our block course also.  As a scientist, I really like the idea of measuring our impacts on the environment because I see how it can give us comfort and reassurance about what we are doing, but I get quite disappointed with the limitations of the approach.  I am a holistic thinker, and so it really annoys me when I'm working hard on something and using tools that aren't able to meet my needs completely.  On the other hand though, I like problems, and so the chance to help make it better does excite me.  Overall, I'm glad someone devised it - measurement tools are important for stewardship and governance! Heres a quick example of how it works from a 'top down' approach:

Amount of bioproductive land (e.g. 11.9 billion hectares) / Amount of people in the world (e.g. 7 billion humans) = 1.7 hectares/person is a 'fair Earth share' on a worldwide view. 

So, the amount of bioproductive land it takes to run you and your life, is your ecological footprint.  This is always a representation of what you are taking from the Earth.  Conversely, what you do to give to the earth and its capacity to function, is your ecological handprint

I enjoyed watching the Centre for Sustainable Practice presentation on this topic because I finally understand this topic better, especially how the ecological overshoot is calculated.  Here are my notes:

I calculated my ecological footprint using one of the many calculators, I chose this one because I don't have data on my electricity and gas bills, so I'm not sure how accurate it is because its easy to just come out similar to the national average I imagine but it came up with 3.2 earths for my lifestyle.  I later found the Project Litefoot calculator also allows for lots of 'average' entries and so it came up with a similar result.  It doesn't seem too far fetched because so far the best estimates on New Zealander's average footprints are up around 7.7 hectares per person.   If you do have detailed information you can use other calculators for NZ such as here and here.  I think that people can only really be expected to substantially lower their footprints when the system they live in (i.e. governance and business) makes it easier for them.  It's the chicken and the egg problem at the moment, right?

I also used the tried calculating my ecological handprint, the opposite of the footprint being the actions that one takes to make things better for the environment, and it turned out to be around 21 I think (it's not very precise or anything, but doing it helps your brain understand what is meant by the concept).