GENEVA, SWITZERLAND, DECEMBER 7, 2023 – The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) recently announced article “Teaching sustainability within the context of everyday life: Steps toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals through the EUSTEPs (Enhancing Universities’ Sustainability Teaching and Practices through Ecological Footprint) Module” as the recipient of the 2023 AASHE Sustainability Award for outstanding research in higher education sustainability. The research – conducted within the context of the EUSTEPs project, funded by the ERASMUS+ programme of the European Union – won in the Campus Sustainability Research Award category.

AASHE bestows its prestigious awards on the institutions and individuals that help lead higher education to a sustainable future. This year, AASHE received 300+ entries resulting in 10 winners announced across five categories. Entries were judged on overall impact, innovation, stakeholder involvement, clarity, and other criteria specific to each category.

Georgios Malandrakis, Associate Professor in Environmental Education at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and EUSTEPs project coordinator, acknowledges the privilege of working with the dedicated and inspiring project team. “It is a great pleasure to receive the AASHE award. This EU funded project brought together 16 researchers from 4 countries whom were initially almost unknown to each other. Through our research collaboration, we became friends, developed this successful educational module, and managed to engage and educate more than 7,000 university students from nearly 60 countries,” explains Malandrakis.

The EUSTEPs project’s successes are a culmination of three years’ work from passionate project partners. “What impresses me most is the wealth of information captured in the various documents and interactive tools we created to empower students, educators, and HEI administrative staff. It’s rewarding that, in our research findings on the EUSTEPs Module, students found Global Footprint Network’s personal Footprint Calculator to be the most useful educational material to better understand how their daily activities fit into the bigger picture of sustainability,” reflects Director of Mediterranean and MENA Regions at Global Footprint Network, and EUSTEPs research awardee Dr. Alessandro Galli.

“The 2023 AASHE Sustainability Award winners exemplify an unwavering commitment to advancing sustainability within their academic institutions. They are setting new standards and reshaping the landscape of sustainability in higher education,” said AASHE Executive Director Meghan Fay Zahniser.

AASHE held a virtual awards ceremony on Dec. 7 to recognize and celebrate the 10 award recipients. Award recipients receive recognition in various formats, including a plaque from Rivanna Natural Designs, a woman-owned B Corp with a strong commitment to sustainability. To date, 135 higher education institutions and people have been recognized through this prestigious award program since its inception in 2006.

To read more about AASHE’s awards programs, please visit http://www.aashe.org/get-involved/awards/.

Media Contacts

Amanda Diep, Director of Communications
Global Footprint Network
media@footprintnetwork.org

Candi Reddick, Director of Marketing & Communications
Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education
(888) 347-9997
creddick@aashe.org

About the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE)
AASHE empowers higher education administrators, faculty, staff, and students to be effective change agents and drivers of sustainability innovation. AASHE enables members to translate information into action by offering essential resources and professional development to a diverse, engaged community of sustainability leaders. We work with and for higher education to ensure that our world’s future leaders are motivated and equipped to solve sustainability challenges. For more information, visit www.aashe.org. Follow AASHE on Facebook, Instagram, and X, formerly known as Twitter.

About EUSTEPs
EUSTEPs (Enhancing Universities’ Sustainability Teaching and Practices through Ecological Footprint) is a project carried out, under the leadership of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, by the strategic partnership between four European universities and non-governmental organisation Global Footprint Network, the official home of the Ecological Footprint methodology and applications. https://www.eusteps.eu/

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GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – 14 SEPTEMBER – New research coordinated by Global Footprint Network’s sustainability scientists in collaboration with food system experts published the article “EU-27 Ecological Footprint was primarily driven by food consumption and exceeded regional biocapacity from 2004 to 2014” today in Nature Food. The way food is provided to and consumed by Europeans represents the largest share of their Ecological Footprint at around 30 percent. The study points to the need for designing, implementing and enforcing policies across each stage of the food supply chain to advance towards the EU Green Deal and Farm to Fork strategy.

From farm to fork, food systems generate many pressures on ecosystems including land use and land use change, water depletion and pollution, biodiversity loss, and greenhouse gas emissions. “People in Europe are eating beyond their means in terms of imports, carbon emissions, and land and water use,” explains article author Professor Roberta Sonnino, Centre for Environment and Sustainability and Fellow of the Institute for Sustainability at the University of Surrey. “The tendency to intervene either on the supply or on the demand side isn’t working. Rather, we need a systemic approach to address them together, as well as looking at trade policies. Instead of taking a scattergun approach, national governments must implement holistic food policies based on evidence – the sort of evidence contained within this research,” Sonnino affirms.

Humanity’s demand for biological resources and ecosystem services far exceeds the planet’s capacity to regenerate biological resources and sequester carbon dioxide emissions, as shown by the progression of Earth Overshoot Day. Similarly, and for the data analysed in the study, the Ecological Footprint of EU-27 residents constantly exceeded the region’s biocapacity and depended upon resources from outside the region to meet EU lifestyle demands.

“The EU Green Deal and the Farm to Fork strategy position the EU as a global leader in the transition towards more sustainable food systems and societies. However, as nearly 25 percent of the biocapacity needed to support the diets of EU-27 residents originates from non-EU countries, our analysis suggests that solely applying Farm to Fork objectives to the domestic agricultural sector will not be sufficient to meet the EU decarbonization targets and instead shifts environmental impacts to non-EU countries,” states lead author and coordinator of the research Alessandro Galli, Ph.D., Director for Mediterranean and MENA Regions, Global Footprint Network.

“Supply-side changes alone are likely insufficient to make the EU-27 food system sustainable in the terms described by the Farm to Fork Strategy. Including both nutritional and sustainability perspectives into national food-based dietary guidelines, changes in food consumption and behaviour trends can be triggered for the benefit of both planetary and human health,” elucidates author Marta Antonelli, Ph.D., Food Systems Project Lead, Global Footprint Network.

Media Contact

Alessandro@footprintnetwork.org
media@footprintnetwork.org

Additional information

NEW Nature Food paper
Interactive Ecological Footprint and biocapacity data platform
Food Footprint Platform
Earth Overshoot Day’s Power of Possibility

About Global Footprint Network

Global Footprint Network is an international sustainability organisation dedicated to creating a world where all can thrive within the Earth’s means. This includes responding to climate change, biodiversity decline, and unmet human needs. Since 2003 we’ve engaged with more than 30 cities, 50 countries, and 70 global partners to improve their resource security by delivering scientific insights relevant for high-impact policy and investment decisions. www.footprintnetwork.org

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Personal mobility is responsible for about 15% of humanity’s total Ecological Footprint, so any comprehensive one-planet strategy likely addresses transportation. City planning is one of the main tools we have available to shift transportation patterns, and it is especially critical because both good and bad planning decisions are literally etched in stone (or concrete and asphalt): the first highways constructed in Europe and the United States are now almost a century old. In some areas, street-layouts have remained unchanged for over a thousand years, essentially locking in the density and walkability of these neighborhoods.

Fortunately, we have the data to look at this more closely. One of the major analytical tools we have here at Global Footprint Network is the Consumption Land-Use Matrix (CLUM). Because it connects household consumption activities to their Ecological Footprints, we can estimate things like the Ecological Footprint associated with the consumption of meat in the Netherlands, the purchase of household appliances in Japan, or tailpipe emissions from personal transportation vehicles worldwide. This blog post will make use of the CLUM to take a deeper look at the Footprint of all transportation activities, how this ‘total transportation Footprint’ differs between countries, and what it might tell us about how we should move forward as we work to end global overshoot.

Which country’s transportation Footprint provides the best example to follow?

Although this is an obvious question to ask, it remains a tricky one: Answering it doesn’t simply mean finding the country with the lowest transportation Footprint per capita, because in general a country’s Footprint naturally increases along with social and economic development. Whereas some lower-income countries may hold plenty of lessons regarding efficient and effective transportation systems, it is nevertheless expected that their Footprints increase as average incomes go up. Clearly the solution to global overshoot cannot be to reduce a country’s wealth or level of development. Instead, answering the question above involves identifying which country (or city, or region) has been the most successful at minimizing its transportation Footprints despite achieving high levels of human development. We can use the Human Development Index to quantify and compare different levels of development.

Figure 1

The relationship between a country’s average per-capita transportation Footprint and its human development index is presented in figure 1, which also highlights how countries can fall along two possible development pathways. Countries that fall on the first pathway, depicted in orange and including Canada, Austria, and Saudi Arabia, have high transportation Footprints relative to their HDI. Countries that fall on the second pathway, depicted in green and including the Netherlands, Denmark, and Japan, have relatively low transportation Footprints compared to HDI. This second pathway represents “current best practice” countries, which their peers should be attempting to emulate and draw inspiration from. However, it must be noted that both trajectories are still moving upwards, whereas ending overshoot will require the curve to be bent down and to the right.

What can we learn from this type of comparison?

Comparing countries is always a difficult exercise, as there is such a diversity of geographic and historic contexts to consider. Given the diversity of countries which make up the high and low development pathways, it is tempting to write off the differences in transportation Footprints as unavoidable. Perhaps the countries in the low-Footprint group are smaller, denser, or their cities may be older? After all, the cities in this group are mostly small and European, whereas the high-Footprint group includes gulf petrostates (Kuwait, Bahrain) and expansive ex-colonies (Canada, Australia). But can we determine specifically why the first group has fared so much better?

Is density to blame for the difference?

Looking at the countries which exhibit high transportation Footprints, many stand out as low density: The United States, Canada, Australia, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia – countries which are large and sparsely populated. However, having a low density at the national level should not tell us too much about their aggregate transportation patterns, as their populations may still be concentrated in a few major cities. A comparison of urbanization rates – the percent of the population living in cities –reveals that there are no significant differences between the high-Footprint trajectory countries (80% urbanized) and the low-Footprint countries (79.5% urbanized).

If there is no difference in urbanization rates, perhaps the difference lies in the density of the cities themselves. Although there is no easily accessible source of data on urban densities, an alternative could involve looking at when populations have grown: The history of urban development patterns suggests that more recent, post-1950 urban development is low-density and car-centric, whereas pre-1950s cities are denser and more accommodating to public transport than the automobile. If population growth is correlated with urban development and we ignore any potential time lags, we can assume that countries which experienced more significant population growth post-1950 can therefore be expected to be more car-oriented, and therefore exhibit higher transportation Footprints.

Figure 2

Plotting a weighted average of the population growth rate for high and low-transportation-Footprint countries shows that the high-Footprint countries have tended to grow twice as fast in recent decades. This is not conclusive evidence however, and there are many exceptions to this pattern which highlight the importance of regional trends: Chile and Argentina (low transportation Footprint countries) have grown at similar rates to their North American counterparts, as have high-Footprint European countries relative to their low-Footprint European peers. Nevertheless, this result suggests a hypothesis that a country’s transportation Footprint is related to the age of its towns and cities.

If transportation Footprint is related to the period in which a country’s population grows and its cities mature, what can be done about it?

After all, we cannot simply make North American cities older, for example. The answer lies in the fact that there is no intrinsic reason why young cities must be more wasteful than the old. The Netherlands is the European country that has grown the fastest since 1950 (from 10 million to over 17 million people), yet despite this fact it has managed to use its history of dense, walkable districts to influence the design of new neighborhoods. Instead of building the sprawling, highway-oriented neighborhoods found in countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, many new developments in the Netherlands are oriented towards density, bicycling, and public transit. This is only possible because of the consensus which exists between planners, politicians, and citizens, and its success is represented in the country’s low transportation Footprint. Each country comes with its own specific context and challenges, and by no means is switching to Dutch-style neighborhood development a silver bullet – the per-capita Dutch Footprint is still far too high if we are to achieve a one planet Footprint. However, it represents one potential model that can put us on the road to living within our means.

What do you think about the importance of urban transportation planning? Send us an email at data@footprintnetwork.org with your response.

The post Ecobytes: Why do some countries have lower transportation Footprints than others? appeared first on Global Footprint Network.

You’ve probably seen bags of cashews sitting on shelves at the grocery store, but have you ever seen the way a cashew grows? It’s pretty funky! The cashew nut grows in a shell on the bottom of a larger fruit called the cashew apple. In order to remove the edible (and delicious) part of the cashew and turn it into what you see at the store, it must go through a difficult and sometimes dangerous process. First, the cashew nut must be separated from the cashew apple, which itself has a variety of uses – as a sore throat remedy in Cuba and Brazil, a pain reliever for rheumatism and neuralgia, food for livestock, and an ingredient in many beauty products such as shampoos and lotions. Despite all these uses, most of the cashew apples produced are thrown away ⁽¹⁾.

To remove the edible cashew from the cashew nut, the outer coating of the nut is repeatedly hit until it cracks opens, and the nut can be removed ⁽²⁾. Here’s the worst part: the outer coating produces a caustic liquid that burns the skin as the nuts are removed from their shell ⁽²⁾. Because of this, workers must use protective measures such as gloves, alkaline pot ash, and bandages to keep themselves safe from harm. Unfortunately, in many factories these protective measures are not provided, leaving workers vulnerable as they cannot afford to purchase protective equipment for themselves ⁽²⁾. When nut prices fluctuate, workers’ salaries also fluctuate, and in an industry that employs over 300,000 people in India alone, these fluctuations have a dramatic effect on local communities and the economy as a whole ^{(3; 4)}. When making decisions at the local grocery store, I often look for labels like “vegan” or “cruelty free,” but none of these include harm done to people as a result of the production process.

According to the International Society for Horticultural Science, India is the largest cashew producer in the world, producing more than a quarter of all nuts produced worldwide ⁽³⁾. While India continues to be the leader in cashew production, other countries have been catching up: Vietnam, Brazil, and many African countries are increasing their cashew production to meet demand. Whereas India’s production is mostly dedicated to their domestic market, these new producers are largely geared towards international exports.

Global demand for cashew nuts has increased over the years, and this should not be surprising: there are many more mouths to feed and improvements in living standards means that many more people can now purchase expensive foods. What is surprising is the rate at which cashew production has increased: 32% between 2010 and 2017.

Cashews are produced at a higher rate than other nuts like almonds, walnuts, and hazelnuts, making their rise in popularity even more distinct. The ecological footprint associated with the production of cashews, which includes the cropland, built-up land, and carbon emissions required for their harvest and processing, has grown by almost 20% from 2010 to 2017.

Over the same seven-year period, countries that produce cashews have also increased their exports dramatically, putting a strain on their environments while consuming countries reap the benefits of delicious nuts. If we consider three of the top exporters (India, Vietnam, and Brazil) we see an average of a 35% increase in the quantity of cashews exported.

What happened during those seven years? Did people wake up one day and decide that cashews were the best nut on the planet? I am more inclined to attribute this increase to the growing desire for plant-based foods. As I’ve grown up, I have seen people in my own circles shift to eating a more plant-based diet, whether that meant going vegetarian or vegan, participating in meatless Monday, or just limiting meat consumption as much as they could. The trend I have seen in my own circles is consistent with a global trend towards more vegan and vegetarian diets (although global meat consumption is still rising) ^{(5, 6)}. Alternatives to animal products have been popping up in coffee shops, fast food chains, and the stock market ^{(6; 7)}, which is a sign of their increased popularity, especially in Western markets.

The result of this shift is increased access to alternative products like egg replacers, imitation meats, and (drumroll please) cashew dairy products. Cashew milk, cashew cheese, cashew butter, cashew ice cream, and tons of other cashew desserts are popping up all over the internet and in grocery stores. Cashews are a primary ingredient in alternative dairy products because they have a mild flavor and their high fat content helps them become creamy when processed. Making those products requires a lot of cashews! Based on an average of online recipes, it takes about 3.16 cups of cashews to make one gallon of cashew milk.  As more cashew dairy products hit the shelves, even more cashews will be produced to meet the demand for dairy alternatives.

Alright, we’re seeing this swap for cashew alternative dairy products, but the big question is: will cashews and other nut milks ever fully displace dairy milk? Many people who are making the switch to plant-based diets are using cashew products as an alternative to dairy products, but these two categories of products do not have the same nutritional value. When comparing the nutritional values of fat free or skim milk to the nutritional values of cashew milk on the USDA FoodData Central website, I found that cashew milk has more calories, less calcium, and less sugar than dairy milk ^{(8, 9)}. Other nutritional categories were relatively similar ^(8,9). These milks cannot be completely substituted for each other, but they remain “close enough” in texture, and are easily substituted in recipes, smoothies, or cereal.

With cashew-based alternatives being a solid substitute for animal products, at least when it comes to texture and flavor, it seems that the popularity of cashews is here to stay. And as people continue to demand more cashews, whether in the form of plant-based alternatives or in their raw form, we will demand more from the people involved in production and from the land of producing countries.

Footnotes:

[1] https://usaidgems.org/Documents/LAC_Guidelines/docs/Cashews.pdf

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/nov/02/cashew-nut-workers-pay-conditions-profits

[3] https://www.actahort.org/books/1080/1080_10.htm

[4] https://www.vvgnli.gov.in/sites/default/files/Cashew%20Workers%20in%20India.pdf

[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetforgrieve/2018/11/02/picturing-a-kindler-gentler-world-vegan-month/?sh=5615678d2f2b

[6] https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankateman/2019/08/19/non-dairy-milk-alternatives-are-experiencing-a-holy-cow-moment/?sh=2bbe93694c44

[7] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/beyond-meat-competitors-5-other-plant-based-meat-market-players-2019-6-1028281341

[8] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/549863/nutrients

[9] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/171269/nutrients

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Personal transportation is a significant contributor to global ecological overshoot—using more ecological resources than our planet’s ecosystem’s capacity for biological regeneration. The commonly discussed problem with transportation using conventional vehicles is the amount of CO₂ they directly emit as they burn fuel. However, indirect Ecological Footprint associated with personal transportation is also a major contributor to overshoot. How much do we save by going electric?

As Earth Overshoot Day (the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year) moves closer and closer to the start of the year, it is imperative that we find resource-efficient transportation alternatives. The Ecological Footprint concept can help us gain an understanding of the best way to address this challenge.

Concerns about CO₂ emissions in the transportation sector has directly spurred innovations such as the electric vehicle (EV). Adoption of EVs is increasing fast: in the United States there was a 41% increase in electric vehicle purchases in 2020 and a projected purchase increase of 70% in 2021.¹ Countless studies have shown that electric vehicles are highly effective in decreasing the amount of direct CO₂ emissions produced by driving. Consequently, it may seem that purchasing an EV is the most effective way to decrease your Ecological Footprint in the transportation sector. Is this necessarily true? Upon closer inspection, the question of whether electric vehicles are a sustainable alternative to conventional vehicles is more nuanced.

While electric vehicles are effective at decreasing direct CO₂ emissions, there are still steps in their production cycle that contribute to the global Ecological Footprint. A crucial fact to consider is that direct carbon emissions are separate from a vehicle’s lifecycle carbon emissions. If a manufacturer uses coal-generated power in their production of the vehicle, or a consumer uses coal-generated electricity to charge their vehicle, the consumer is still relying on the use of fossil fuels to operate the vehicle. Besides direct emissions, Figure 1 also shows the indirect Footprint from driving a vehicle (this calculation factors both EV and standard vehicles). This includes the Footprint associated with the production and maintenance of the vehicle, and for most countries it is still higher than the total Footprint associated with public transit and air-travel combined!

Infrastructure production and maintenance is also part of the indirect footprint. Roads are very resource-intensive to maintain, and the maintenance requirement scales with traffic as more and heavier vehicles require more frequent construction and resurfacing. However, the indirect footprint does not capture the fact that claiming geographic space for car infrastructure itself comes at a cost: This can be directly in the form of Biocapacity, with roads and interchanges replacing productive land: in an auto-centric region like Los Angeles county, 24% of the total area is dedicated to cars, 14% of which is parking.² It also comes at the cost of perpetuating unsustainable low-density patterns of suburban sprawl.

Another issue regarding the sustainability of electric vehicles is their batteries. EV batteries are made using precious metals. In fully electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries are the most common, while hybrid vehicles use nickel or cobalt.³ The Institute for Energy Research found that over 10 million tons of lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese will be mined for new batteries in the next decade. Lithium production in particular has increased by nearly three times the amount in the last ten years.⁴ This is an alarming development due to the environmentally exploitative measures required to extract these metals from the ground. Lithium extraction in particular is extremely water intensive. In Chile’s Salar de Atacama, mining activities consumed over 65% of the region’s water.⁵ Mining activities also create chemical runoff into the groundwater and contribute to air pollution.

Finally, we must also consider that sustainability goes beyond natural resource use and also encompasses the fair treatment of those involved in production processes. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, cobalt is extracted using child-labor and with minimal protective equipment.⁶ In order for EV’s to be a truly sound alternative to conventional vehicles, labor practices must be carefully monitored to ensure the well-being and just compensation of those involved in their production.

Given all the above, it is clear that electric vehicles may not be a perfect solution to increasing sustainability in the transportation sector. While EV’s clearly reduce the direct carbon emissions from transportation, the effects of indirect emissions and exploitative production practices make electric vehicles a less-than-ideal alternative. Nevertheless, large problems often require imperfect solutions. Although studies are still being conducted to gauge the impacts of the total EV lifecycle, it is likely that over time the net environmental impact of purchasing an electric vehicle is positive. At the end of the day, it is probably best to hold on to the car you already have (conventional or otherwise) unless you need a new one.

If electric vehicles are not the best way to address to our personal transportation problem, what is the most sustainable solution? The answer involves finding alternatives to private transportation altogether when possible. Public transport leads to a much smaller environmental impact per person due to the large passenger capacity, and this can be seen in the data: Figure 1, we can see that the Footprint of public transportation is much lower per capita than the combined Footprints of private transportation. Again, the public transportation sector in the figure also represents air travel, so the real Footprint from public transportation is even lower. From someone who has lived in the United States her whole life, I have noticed that people feel the need to purchase cars due to the lack of accessible public transportation in most of the country – for example, every person in my family has their own vehicle because we all need to drive to get to work every day. This should not have to be the case. Conversely, I had the privilege to spend a few months in Ecuador and I noticed fewer people own vehicles, but public transportation is much more widely accessible. This should be the norm in urban areas, and there should be a global effort to support public transportation to counteract the increasing emissions caused by driving. This way, we can effectively work to #MoveTheDate of Earth Overshoot Day.

[1] https://blastpoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/BlastPoint-2021-EV-Outlook_Report.pdf

[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01944363.2015.1092879

[3] https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_batteries.html

[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-of-lithium/

[5] https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/the-environmental-impact-of-lithium-batteries/

[6] Same source as 4.

The post Ecobytes: What difference do electric vehicles truly make? appeared first on Global Footprint Network.

Reducing meat consumption is often presented as one of the most sustainable actions an individual can make. This has become a common talking point in environmental media, and these discussions have prompted me to think more about some of my dietary choices. But it has also made me curious to learn more about the data that backs these claims: how many cattle are raised around the world annually to feed everyone, and how does this production affect the environment of the producing countries?

In 2017, 64 million tonnes of beef was produced globally. Brazil is the world’s largest producer of cattle as well as the largest beef exporter, providing “close to 20 percent of total global beef products” according to the USDA’s Environmental Research Service.¹ UNFAO’s data on livestock production shows that Brazil had a stock of 215 million cattle in 2017.² In that same year, 9.5 million tonnes of beef were produced, and 1 million tonnes of beef and veal was exported.

You might be asking yourself, “So what? What do all these numbers mean? And what does it mean for Brazil’s environment?” I also asked myself these questions, because frankly, I find it difficult to empathize with numbers unless they’re contextualized.

The concepts of biocapacity and global hectares are powerful tools to establish the necessary context for these numbers. Biocapacity is the amount of biologically productive land (or water) available for regeneration, including crop land, forest land, and grazing land, among others. This total area is averaged to create a standard unit called a global hectare. As we continue to demand more from our natural environments, consume more products, increase our population size, and degrade our ecosystems, we deplete the ability of our bioproductive lands (and water) to regenerate. While we may be able to survive while running a biocapacity deficit in the short term, the long-term implications of depletion are disastrous. For example, by clearing the most biodiverse forest in the world to make space for cattle grazing, we increase meat supplies in the short run, but we lose countless species from habitat loss, reduce potential oxygen production and carbon drawdown that the cleared forest could have provided, and destroy the homes and ancestral land of indigenous communities.

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A significant portion of Brazil’s beef is pasture-raised, but while this might sound like a win for environmentally conscious shoppers, this pasture-fed beef comes at a steep price. Between 2015 and 2017, 210,000 acres of deforestation in Brazil were linked to Brazilian beef exports.³ The report is published by Trase, a deforestation tracking platform created by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Global Canopy. Between June 2016 and July 2017, former President Trump temporarily lifted a ban on fresh meat imports. During those same dates, Amazon deforestation spiked massively as fresh meat imports to the US also spiked in Brazil.⁴

The cleared land is used for grazing cattle to produce the beef products that are exported worldwide. Global Footprint Network’s National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts show that in 2017, Brazil’s Ecological Footprint of export (EFe) of cattle meat, beef, and veal was over 25.8 million global hectares. The Ecological Footprint of exports represents the biocapacity required to produce the goods being exported. To put that into context, the biocapacity used for the export of cattle in Brazil alone was larger than Ireland and Belgium’s total biocapacity combined in 2017.

What does this deforestation mean for Brazil? Global Footprint Network’s data shows that Brazil continues to have a biocapacity reserve of 5.8 global hectares per person. This means that Brazil’s residents are living within the means of the natural resources within its borders. However, this large biocapacity reserve is due to the fact that Brazil is steward to the most biodiverse land in the world. Brazilians on average have an Ecological Footprint of 2.8 global hectares per person. Put another way, to regenerate all the resources that Brazilians demand in a year, we would still need 1.5 Earths.

Brazil’s biocapacity reserve is literally burning at this moment. Much of their biocapacity resides within the Amazon forest, which is being actively burned down to make room for cattle grazing and farming, mining and wood extraction. ⁵ While deforestation figures vary, Mongabay’s database on Amazon deforestation shows that in 2017, 2,682 square miles of the rainforest were chopped down.⁶ The data is pooled from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research and Imazon, a Brazilian NGO.

Global Footprint Network’s public data shows that Brazil’s biocapacity reserve has been declining at an exponential rate since 1961, the earliest year of data collection by the organization.⁷ In 1961, the country had a biocapacity reserve of 20.5 global hectares per person. In 2017, the biocapacity reserve was 5.8 global hectares per person.

This biocapacity decline can be reversed. Brazil set some of the most ambitious targets for their Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement, which was signed in 2015 and outlines national commitments to reducing their impact on climate change to keep global warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius of pre-Industrial Revolution levels. Brazil reaffirmed their commitment to reducing total net greenhouse gas emissions by 37% in 2025 and reducing emissions by 43% in 2030, based on their 2005 emissions.⁸ According to the Brazilian Roundtable on Sustainable Livestock, one way the country is tackling this goal is by reducing the amount of pasture land and concentrating livestock grazing.⁹ As global citizens, one way we can help Brazil reach their goals is to be more conscious of the beef we consume. Choosing to consume beef sourced elsewhere would reduce demand for Brazilian beef, thus reducing the need for more grazing land. Another option would be to reduce the amount of meat you consume in a week. And perhaps the strongest way to help reduce the environmental footprint of beef production around the world is to educate others on the impact of their meal decisions, giving them the power to make more informed choices.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/july/brazil-once-again-becomes-the-world-s-largest-beef-exporter

[2] Brazil Workbook License (available for purchase here)

[3] http://resources.trase.earth/documents/infobriefs/TraseInfobrief8En.pdf

[4] https://news.mongabay.com/2019/10/brazilian-beef-industry-plays-outsized-role-in-tropical-carbon-emissions-report

[5] https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/19/americas/brazil-deforestation-amazon-2019-trnd/index.html

[6] https://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/deforestation-rate.html

[7] https://data.footprintnetwork.org

[8] https://www.gov.br/mre/en/contact-us/press-area/press-releases/brazil-submits-its-nationally-determined-contribution-under-the-paris-agreement

[9] https://www.inputbrasil.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/GTPS_BRAZILIAN-LIVESTOCK-OVERVIEW_v3.pdf

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This is part of the Ecobytes series where we explore interesting topics from Ecological Footprint and biocapacity data. Future installments will cover a wide range of topics. This first blog, sets the stage for all the fascinating data found in Global Footprint Network’s suite of data offerings.

Diving into resource trends

Our best resource accounting tells us that global ecological overshoot began in the early 1970s. That’s when humanity’s total demand for biological regeneration (we call this the Ecological Footprint) surpassed our planet’s biological capacity to regenerate resources (biocapacity).

Diving deeper, let’s take a closer look at Ecological Footprint and biocapacity, but at the country level. Ecological Footprint is associated with the residents of a country, while biocapacity is associated with the country’s bioproductive surface areas. These areas include land, inland water, and marine areas that a country has rights to, or its exclusive economic zone (EEZ). In the map below—click it to see in animate from 1961 to 2017—countries in green run a biocapacity reserve; their residents consume less than their ecosystems can regenerate. Countries in red run a biocapacity deficit; their residents consume more resources than their ecosystems can regenerate.

Striking a balance between production and consumption

Can we conclude that countries in red are bad and countries in green are good? Or that red countries are destroying their environments by overharvesting or polluting? It isn’t that simple. Thinking of each country as a homestead, we can generalize that residents in red countries need to supplement their consumption with resources from outside their borders. We label these “purchases” as trade, and it isn’t a bad thing. For example, if the lemon tree on your homestead produces extra lemons this season, you can trade them with your neighbor for their eggs. If you live in the city and don’t have any productive land, trade allows you to buy both lemons and eggs even though you don’t produce either.

In Ecological Footprint and biocapacity accounting, being in the red doesn’t automatically mean that you’ve polluted or clearcut forests. For example, Switzerland runs a biocapacity deficit. The Swiss require roughly 4.5 times Switzerland’s biocapacity to support the consumption of Swiss residents. However, Switzerland is known for its beautiful Alps, fresh air, and clean water. Even though Switzerland runs a biocapacity deficit, the physical manifestation of environmental damage does not necessarily occur in Switzerland. The country and its residents can do this by purchasing goods from outside the Swiss borders instead of cutting down their trees and polluting their environment. This is trade. The global market allows us to trade goods and services in a way that optimizes the production and consumption of resources for everyone’s benefit (or at least this is the hope).

A planet of consumers

So, if it’s not trade, what’s the challenge? It would be problematic if the entire map was red and every country were net consumers. And herein lies the difference between biocapacity deficit and ecological overshoot. We don’t all live on bountiful lands overflowing with biocapacity that can provide for our material demands. Like the Swiss, countries that run biocapacity deficits can trade for goods from outside their borders. However, with ecological overshoot when humanity as a whole consumes more than Earth can regenerate, there isn’t a spare Earth with which we can trade our goods and services for additional resources. Our planet endures the physical manifestation of humanity’s environmental overuse through overharvesting forests and fish stocks, drawdown of soils, and accumulation of waste. As we continue to overconsume the biocapacity of our planet, the risk of more countries running a biocapacity deficit increases.

Let’s look at more data!

Tracking trade is key to understanding which countries are the ultimate producers and consumers of biocapacity. In order to achieve this, we use IO (input-output) data from our Ecological Footprint extended MRIO model, which can help us trace the flow of biocapacity through the global economy. Every single pair of countries in our database has an associated flow of biocapacity between them. One way to represent this overwhelming amount of data is by using a Sankey diagram. For example, the figure below shows the flow of crop biocapacity after all countries have been aggregated into continents.

Link to online/interactive diagram

We’ve talked about global trade, as well as ecological deficits and reserves, but is there something analogous on a smaller scale? The reality is that for almost all people on earth, consumption and production are separate activities, and we think about our roles in terms of how much we consume every week. This is a great topic for another blog, and you can learn more about your personal Footprint with our online Footprint Calculator.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this dive into sustainability data. Keep an eye out for our next Ecobytes blog post, where we’ll explore beef from Brazil: How many cattle are raised around the world annually to feed everyone, and how does this production affect the environment of the producing countries? Stay tuned!

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To maintain progress and eradicate poverty, countries need either sufficient biological resources within their country to match their ecological footprint, or money to competitively buy what they need on markets abroad. When neither of these two conditions are met, countries may end up in an ecological poverty trap — a situation in which the country’s biological resources are insufficient to provide enough food, fibres, building materials and CO₂ sequestration, among other factors.

“What worries us even more is the fact that most development strategies across the world are not adequately addressing this vast resource insecurity, thereby becoming severely anti-poor,” said Mathis Wackernagel. “The tragedy is that many strategies exist to improve resource security, but they are not being employed at scale in any country—even though they are the only true value-generating opportunities, as all other resource-depleting activities are ultimately destroying wealth and opportunities,” he added.

Mathis Wackernagel and colleagues compared and classified countries based on their relative gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and ecological deficit (the amount of biological resources they consume in excess of what their own ecosystems can renew) between 1980 and 2017, to analyse the exposure of national economies to resource constraints. The authors found that the percentage of the world’s population living in a country with both a deficit in biological resources and below-world-average income went from 57% in 1980 to 72% in 2017. In addition, the worldwide ecological deficit went from 19% to 73% over the same period.

The authors emphasize strategies exist to enable lasting development, that both advances human development and resource security. They include: the way we build and manage our cities, how we power them, how we feed ourselves, and how many we are. Where financial budgets are scarce, the question is how existing budgets are used to favour solutions that avoid, rather than increase, the likelihood of sliding towards an ecological poverty trap. Once the threshold has been crossed, exiting the trap in the absence of biological and financial resources becomes close to impossible.

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Resources

The Importance of Resource Security for Poverty Eradication, Nature Sustainability

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The premise is simple: countries that consume more than can be produced domestically and have less than world-average income are particularly exposed to resource insecurity. Since every person needs biological resources for all their basic functions such as food, water, shelter, clothing, and energy to operate things, this double constraint becomes a major threat.

The threat is amplified by global overshoot. Humanity already demands more from nature each year than the planet’s ecosystems can regenerate. As resource depletion becomes more acute, competition for those resources will become fiercer. The rapid depletion is already taking its toll, as evident through a litany of environmental challenges including excessive amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, biodiversity loss, freshwater shortages, and deforestation.

The double resource challenge is not new. Common sense would conclude that we all need resources to operate. Moreover, operating our economy in the present by using the natural capital needed to regenerate future resources is self-defeating.

Economic development strategies fail to adequately address double resource challenge

Nevertheless, current economic development theory and practice seem to feed into this self-defeating pattern. The pervasive view on economic development and resource use is still rooted in a colonialist mentality of extracting or exploiting, based on the assumption that there is always more elsewhere. This approach is maintained in the name of improving wellbeing, theorized back when humanity’s resource metabolism still fit within planetary limits.

This emphasizes pathways that end up making populations even more resource dependent. Meanwhile, global overshoot keeps growing – only interrupted by disaster-induced contractions as the one experienced with COVID-19.

Examples of ineffective development strategies abound. Economists lament about shrinking populations as it might reduce economic activities. The World Bank continues to support policies that are largely driven by GDP. Germany continues to push for completing a new pipeline for natural gas from Russia, directing investment towards fossil fuel infrastructure, while it is obvious that we need to move out of fossil fuel use more rapidly than most can imagine. The UK wants to open a coal mine in Cumbria – while also hosting COP26.

Some may argue that calls for “climate proofing” development have become more prominent over the last decade. These calls have had little impact because they portray the resource challenge, which the climate problem ultimately is, as a conditionality, something extra added to the already difficult task list of providing for education, health, public safety, etc. In reality, making development last needs far more than “climate proofing”. It requires approaches that massively reduce overall resource dependence while increasing wellbeing.

Addressing wellbeing and the double resource challenge

How? Pretty simple. And different from the dominant development practice today, whether it is countries’ own development policies, or international development efforts directed by high-income countries intended for low-income populations. On the supply side, lasting development requires investing in the resilience and productivity of biological capital. On the demand side, it requires finding ways to satisfy human needs through far less resource-demanding options which we divide into four main areas:

• How we build cities. The way cities are shaped and managed determines how we live – compact, integrated cities with resource-efficient infrastructure and little need for mobility, beyond walking and bicycling, are the most future proof–and increasingly most valuable–cities.
• How we power ourselves. Here the arguments are best understood. Coal power vs. solar makes a huge difference. We also need ways to balance out mismatch between supply and demand, including storage, and incentives to shift power demands to times of power abundance.
• How we feed ourselves. Already, food occupies about half the planet’s regenerative capacity. We cannot as easily cut calories per person, but rather the composition of our diets. We can also eliminate some of our food waste (currently close to 40% of all the food produced in the world, according to the FAO).
• How many we are. The more we are, the less planet there is per person. Encouraging smaller families has vast social and economic benefits, and over time, cumulatively, enormous ecological advantages.

To be sure, some development efforts already point in this direction. There are projects to electrify rural areas through the solar revolution; initiatives to help small-holders retain more of the value add of the value chain which they deliver by having more control over their land, their harvest and the timing of selling their products. But these initiatives are still outweighed by large-scale traditional infrastructure projects, blind to the need for accelerating the demographic transition and radically dematerializing human needs. The evidence of the insufficient development strategies are obvious: overshoot keeps growing and the percentage of those in countries with biological resource deficit and less than world average income keeps growing as well.

This is not fate. It is a misguided development policy which is not informed by the physical reality of our planet. Such practice is anti-poor and dangerous because it forces people to live off depletion, which cannot last. It puts social progress at risk. The impacts of good and bad choices are measurable and another future is possible. What are we waiting for?

To maintain progress and eradicate poverty, countries need either sufficient natural resources within their country to match their Ecological Footprint, or money to competitively buy what they need on markets abroad. When neither of these two conditions are met, countries may end up in an ecological poverty trap — a situation in which the country’s natural resources are insufficient to provide enough food, fibres, building materials and CO₂ sequestration, among other factors.

Many thanks to authors Mathis Wackernagel¹, Laurel Hanscom¹, Priyangi Jayasinghe2, David Lin¹, Adeline Murthy¹, Evan Neill³, and Peter Raven⁴. Wackernagel originated the research idea, contributed to research design, and lead the write-up of the paper. Lin, Hanscom, and Murthy participated in the research design, research execution, and write-up. Neill performed analysis. Raven and Jayasinghe contributed to research design and write-up.

1           Global Footprint Network, 1528 Webster Street, Suite 11, Oakland, CA 94612, USA; corresponding author mathis.wackernagel@footprintnetwork.org
2           Munasinghe Institute for Development, 10/1 De Fonseka Place, Colombo 5, Sri Lanka
3           Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Rd, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
4           Missouri Botanical Garden, 4344 Shaw Blvd., St. Louis, Missouri 63110, USA

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Humanity has achieved so much, including rising longevity around the world, hyper-connectivity, easy and cheap access to information, incredibly safe mobility. Yet there are critical arenas in which progress is so slow that it is starting to put at risk many, if not all, the amazing human achievements.

The just released IPBES report on the state of biodiversity, complementing the 1.5°C IPCC report on climate, or the ever earlier Earth Overshoot Day, make obvious that the material conditions for a thriving humanity are eroding.

Paradoxically though, as explained in our new paper, this systemic depletion of the biosphere is economically barely showing up for the high-income urbanites of the world. This means humanity lacks meaningful feedback loops that could correct the situation.

This we examined in our data-rich paper “Defying the Footprint Oracle: Implications of Country Resource Trends” published in the journal Sustainability, and written by Global Footprint Network staff and Dr. Peter Raven, former president of AAAS and member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

The missing financial feedbacks are exacerbated by a misguided narrative propagating such false beliefs as:

• there is a trade-off between development and environment;
• technological progress is making natural capital irrelevant;
• abundant resources are a “curse” for economic development;
• environment is too slow and distant.

In reality, humanity has never been more dependent on natural capital and never have more people been exposed to resource scarcity, with 6.5 billion people living in countries with a biocapacity deficit. Also, the environment is not a conditionality nor an additional burden, and there is no trade-off.

In fact, it is the other way around. Resource security is the core enabler of human development – together with its non-material twin: human trust. Eroding our home also erodes human trust. Conversely, if we put resource security at the center of our development efforts, then lasting development success becomes possible.

Our paper identifies eight countries already facing what we call “ecological poverty trap” with very low, and yet declining, per person Footprints. It points out 23 further countries approaching this condition.

The paper also outlines that these trends can be reversed. The environmental situation is not just biologically predetermined, nor are we stuck in inevitable Malthusian downward spirals. We are limited by our own misguided beliefs including those guiding our current climate policies and narratives. There, to use an allegory, “we recognize the coming storm, but we choose not fix our own boat as long others do not fix their boats.”

We will not reverse the current trends if we keep ignoring them. But if we put resource security at the center of policy and development efforts, then we begin to have a chance to build a future where all can thrive.

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