Do We Fit On The Planet?

Food Systems and the Ecological Footprint

Sharon Ede, Urban Ecology Australia, 2002.4 (Available in http://www.urbanecology.org.au/articles/dowefit.html) All human beings, whatever their lifestyles, generate impacts on nature, but this is not a concern provided our impacts are within the means of nature, that is within the regenerative capacity of the biosphere. Concerns over resource use have previously focused on the depletion of finite nonrenewable resources such as fossil fuels and minerals, however it is increasingly recognised that it is renewable resources which are the nonnegotiable limiting factors for sustaining life. Historically, countries have sustained economic growth by appropriating biocapacity (resources, ecological services, waste sinks) from elsewhere through purchasing power, with some waste such as CO2 and CFCs being dumped into the global commons. However this model of dependence on ghost acreage (biocapacity on which a country depends, but which is not physically within the borders of that country), which has both the developed and developing world alike in its grasp, ignores one simple reality not everyone can be a net importer of biocapacity. Once the biological carrying capacity of the planet is exceeded, development occurs through the liquidation of the planets natural capital stock, switching from the reproductive use of the resource base, which leaves it intact, to an extractive use, which reduces the total store. Instead of living off the Earths interest, humanity begins draining the Earth's 'capital', and we move into what is termed ecological overshoot.

Overshoot graphic by Phil Testemale (in Rees & Wackernagel, 1996)

Overshoot is when human demand exceeds natures supply at the local, national, or global scale. The level of overshoot is the amount by which natures biological capacity is being used beyond its regeneration rate. Sustainability Sustainability has a specific meaning - avoiding ecological overshoot. The myriad of fuzzy definitions attributed to sustainability keeps discussions vague, and diffuses the pressure for action. Fuzzy terms include 'sustainable development' and its omnipresent Brundtland definition meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. This definition is problematic - how do we know how many people there will be in future generations, and what their needs will be? Also, many societies today are not just meeting needs, but wants - should future generations be allowed to fulfil their wants as well as their needs? Defining sustainability in a way which is both specific and measurable necessitates keeping of biophysical accounts to enable us to determine whether we are moving into or avoiding overshoot. It would be unthinkable to run a business without keeping the books - a business which does not track its activities and keep accurate financial records runs the risk of bankruptcy - yet this is precisely the approach we take with the only planet within our reach capable of supporting life. Footprints As Resource Accounting Tools Resource accounting tools are needed to monitor humanitys use of nature in order to answer what may be the most important question which has ever confronted our political, social and economic institutions: do we fit on the planet? Ecological Footprinting measures human use of nature and aggregates our impacts on the biosphere into one figure, the bioproductive space occupied exclusively by a given human activity, expressed in hectares. Footprinting inverts the traditional concept of carrying capacity, the population a given region could support, and instead seeks to determine ecological load what total area of land is required, regardless of where that land is located, to sustain a given population, organisation or activity. National Footprints are underpinned by complex spreadsheets designed to enable calculation of a countrys per capita Footprint (demand), and compare it with the biocapacity (supply) of the country and planet.

Official data from the UN Food & Agriculture Organisation, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a range of other reputable sources, such as the World Resources Institute, form the basis of national Footprint accounts. The spreadsheets track a countrys production, import, export and apparent consumption of approximately 60 categories of commodities in biophysical units (eg. tonnes) rather than monetary units, and each category includes both primary resources (raw timber or milk) and manufactured products that are derived from them (paper or cheese). Conversion factors are used to account for the efficiency of conversion of raw materials (eg. milk) to manufactured products (eg. cheese). Adjusted conversion factors correct true conversion efficiencies to account for secondary animal products, such as hides and wool. Direct comparison of actual land area raises an equity issue, as countries have access to different land types of varying quality. Figures are corrected for bioproductivity by multiplying the actual area of land (hectares) by an equivalence factor to produce area units. The equivalence factor represents the productivity of a category of land globally as compared to average land globally ie. arable land is scaled up in relation to average space, as it is more biologically productive. Biocapacity figures are also corrected using a yield factor, which illustrates how much more or less productive a countrys land is in comparison to same category across the rest of the world. Footprint results underestimate human impact and overestimate available biological capacity by choosing conservative estimates when in doubt, leaving out some activities for which there is insufficient data, assuming current agricultural yields are sustainable and excluding activities that systematically erode natures ability to regenerate, eg. use of materials for which the biosphere has no significant assimilation capacity, such as plutonium, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and processes that irreversibly damage the biosphere eg. species extinction, aquifer destruction, deforestation, desertification. Even with this cautious approach, research undertaken by Redefining Progress using Ecological Footprint analysis reveals that in 1996, the average Footprint per person was 2.85 hectares. However there are only 2.2 hectares per person available globally. Biologically productive space needed to support 17.1 billion 6 billion people living on a 2.85 hectare Footprint hectares (1996) Biologically productive space on the planet 12.6 billion (1996) hectares

Number of planets needed to sustain 6 billion people living on a 2.85 hectare Footprint

1.35

A time series which calculates the global Footprint and global biocapacity for every year from 1961 1997 has been developed by Oakland based Redefining Progress (www.rprogress.org). The series reveals that some time during the mid- 1970s, humanity crossed over from a reproductive to an extractive use of nature. By 1997, humanitys footprint had exceeded global carrying capacity by over 30%. This means that one and a third planets are currently required to sustain humanity ie. nature takes one year and four months to regenerate the bioproductive capacity we use in a year.

0 2 (Figure showing ecological footprint; available biocapacity; available biocapacity allowing 10% for nature reserves.) The question is not whether we can sustain more than six billion people on a western industrial model of development, but how to sustain the projected global population at an adequate standard of living for all within the regenerative biocapacity of one planet. Furthermore, it is vital that a percentage of the earth be set aside to allow bioproductive space for the millions of other species that share the planet with humanity, and whom we typically exclude from the spaces occupied for human uses. The Footprint methodology uses the 1987 Brundtland report figure of 12% - an estimate considered to be politically courageous but ecologically inadequate, as conservation biologists think the necessary figure is more likely to be somewhere between 25- 75%. Competition for biocapacity occurs not only between species, but between economies. As the Footprint is an aggregated indicator which highlights the

connections of ecological functions and human pressures on nature, it can reveal competition for ecological space. Once the Footprint exceeds biological capacity, human uses of nature become competitive with each other. Alleviating one pressure may simply shift the load elsewhere, or one impact may even exacerbate another. Because the Footprint is an accounting tool based on physical rather than monetary data, it can provide us with crucial information pertaining to resource use and ecological limits which is absent from conventional economic analysis. market scarcity and ecological scarcity are increasingly separate phenomena, the former representing the immediate supply on the market (as expressed by market prices), the latter giving an indication of total existing stocks (as expressed in biophysical accounts). As global trade delinks market scarcity and ecological scarcity, the healthy and necessary feedback loop between ecological capacity and human consumption is broken Mathis Wackernagel As the demand for biocapacity grows while the supply shrinks, tracking use of nature is imperative both for countries with an ecological deficit who are dependent on imported carrying capacity, as well as for ecological creditors who are supplying the debtors with biocapacity, often through liquidating their own natural capital. The Ecological Footprint enables us to understand sustainability in a way that is both measurable, and grounded within ecological realities.

Cities and Food Footprints

Cities have enormous potential as leverage points for change - not only is over half of humanity now living in urban areas worldwide, but development and the making of cities is the single most powerful source of impacts on the planet. Creating and maintaining the built environment generates massive amounts of resource extraction and use, and it is imperative that we understand the city as an ecosystem, acknowledging and addressing the behaviour of these mega-organisms, and their impact beyond city limits. In the mid 1990s, Herbert Girardet (author of the Gaia Atlas of Cities) estimated the Ecological Footprint of London, and found that it was 125 times the actual surface area of London.

We need to understand how and where our cities are appropriating and altering other areas of earth to service their needs: Estimates at the time of the Earth Summit (Rio) in 1992 found that 75 percent of the natural resources that we harvest and mine from the Earth are shipped, trucked, railroaded and flown to 2.5 percent of the Earths surface, which is metropolitan. At that destination, 80 percent of those resources are converted into waste. Jac Smit, Urban Agriculture & Biodiversity Cities and urban areas, with their immense economic and political power, are central to global and local ecological problems, and they must become central to solutions. As largely urban creatures, people need to understand and take responsibility for the patterns of how cities behave in nature, their relationship to their regions, how urban demands generate environmental problems and how this dynamic can be harnessed for the purposes of ecological development and restoration.

(City footprint graphic by Phil Testemale (in Rees & Wackernagel, 1996) The Footprint concept can be used to help us explore ways of making our cities not only as ecologically benign as possible, but as productive (or biogenic) rather than biocidic (or destructive) in form and function.

Ecological Load of Urban Food Systems

Human settlements depend upon agriculture for survival, however few city dwellers are ever faced with the effects their lives make on areas beyond the city limits, such as the consequences of large scale agriculture required to feed the hordes of urban dwellers, the impacts generated by growing, amassing and transporting resources required for consumption in the city. with access to global resources, urban populations everywhere are seemingly immune to the consequences of locally unsustainable land and resource management practices... William Rees & Mathis Wackernagel Environmental impacts resulting from food production - such as dryland salinity, demand for water, runoff of pesticides and fertilisers made necessary by centralised production/monocultural agribusiness are predominantly generated by the demands of urban markets. Food production systems which are dependent on extensive external supply lines are also a large contributor to food miles, greenhouse emissions resulting from fossil fuel consumption required for transport & refrigeration. Economics, particularly so-called economic rationalism is supposed to be about the efficient use of resources what more gross misallocation of resources and human effort could there be than shipping low value agricultural produce such as strawberries halfway around the planet?' Michael Rowbotham, August 2001, Community Economics Conference, Adelaide

(Africa image by P V Vernon from Sharing Natures Interest (2000) by Nicky Chambers, Craig Simmons & Mathis Wackernagel http://www.ecologicalfootprint.com) The emergence of global trade and its network of extensive external supply lines has resulted in an enormous expansion of humanitys food footprint, particularly in terms of food miles. Transporting food into the city from often distant locations has greenhouse implications the further we have to transport it in (or out), the higher the embodied energy of our food. This is a significant issue in relation to the cost

of fuel and its effect on availability and affordability of food, particularly in the face of any future oil shocks.

Urban Agriculture
agriculture and food consumption is the largest contributor to humanitys ecological load, appropriating over 60 percent of the planets regenerative capacity... Mathis Wackernagel & Diana Deumling There is growing recognition that urban agriculture can meet a percentage of urban dwellers food needs within urban areas. Urban food production (including permaculture, roof & community gardens) may be the most powerful tool we have to close open nutrient, carbon and pollution loops while contributing positively to local and regional economic activity. Urban agriculture could also assist in arresting and reversing biodiversity loss: One acre of urban agriculture, using urban waste as an input, can save five acres, or more, of rural marginal agricultural land or rain forestUrban agriculture is an effective tool to slow down the loss of biodiversity Jac Smit, Urban Agriculture & Biodiversity Incorporating urban food production into food systems has many potential benefits reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and a range of other environmental impacts, protection of biodiversity, local economic stimulation, nutritional & other health benefits, reduction of urban heat islands, community building through people working together, and neighbourhood security as a result of passive surveillance. Perhaps most importantly, Ecological Footprinting can help to re-establish humanitys psychological connection to nature by measuring and making visible impacts which have largely been rendered unseen. Produced by Sharon Ede for Urban Ecology Australias 10th Birthday Celebration Bioregional Banquet, 21 April 2002

References
Wackernagel, Mathis & Rees, William (1996) Our Ecological Footprint Reducing Human Impact on the Earth New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada Wackernagel, Mathis (2000) Importing Carrying Capacity: How Global Trade Enables Nations and the World to Accumulate and Ecological Debt Contribution to Professor Kenneth Watts Encyclopaedia on Human Ecology, Transaction Publishers/ Rutgers, New Jersey, US.

Wackernagel, Mathis (2001) Advancing Sustainable Resource Management: Using Ecological Footprint Analysis for Problem Formulation, Policy Development and Communication Draft Paper prepared for DGXI, European Commission Redefining Progress, Oakland. Wackernagel, Mathis & Deumling, Diana (2001) Eating up the Earth: How Sustainable Food Systems Reverse Humanitys Assault on the Biosphere Draft outline for a briefing paper for the philanthropic community on the ecological significance of sustainable food systems Redefining Progress, Oakland. Wackernagel, Mathis; Yount, David & Deumling, Diana (2000) Accounting for the Future: A Handbook for National (and Regional) Ecological Footprint Analysis Draft Redefining Progress, Oakland.

Author
Sharon Ede, an Urban Ecology Australia Board Member who works for the South Australian Department for Environment & Heritage, undertook research/study in May 2001 with California based organisation Redefining Progress, whose Sustainability Program is directed by Mathis Wackernagel, one of the Footprints creators. 2007.2.8