Ecological footprints over Europe

摘要

The concept of the 'ecological footprint' is used to measure the impact of an individual, a community, a city, a country, or the world's population as a whole upon the Earth's natural resources. The initial development of the concept is attributed to the work of William Rees and Mathis Wackemagel in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia. Rees for example, defines the ecological footprint of a population as 'the total area of land and water ecosystems required to produce the resources that the population consumes, and to assimilate the wastes that the population generates, wherever on Earth the relevant land/water are located'. The WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) argues3 that 'of all the tools that can help us get a grip on what is meant by sustainable development, possibly the most substantive and illuminating - if not the single most helpful of all - is the ecological footprint'.