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Indicator: HS-74 Australia's ecological footprint

Data

Australia's ecological footprint as reported in WWF's Living Planet Reports

Year	Ecological footprint (global hectares per capita)
2000	8.49
2002	7.58
2004	7.70

Source: Loh, J & Wackernagel, M (Eds.) 2004, Living Planet Report 2004, World Wildlife Fund, Gland, Switzerland, viewed 15 Dec 2005, http://www.panda.org/news_facts/newsroom/index.cfm?uNewsID=15976.

What the data mean

Australia’s footprint has been estimated to be 7.7 global hectares per capita (gha) (Loh & Wackernagel 2004, p. 26). The ecological footprints for the most populous States have been estimated as 7.01 gha per capita in 1998-99 for NSW (EPA NSW 2003) and 8.1 gha per capita for Victoria (EPA Victoria 2005, p. 1). The ecological footprint for the Sydney Greater Metropolitan Region was calculated as 7.4 gha per capita based on 1999 data (Lezen and Lundie, 2002).

Australia’s cities have ecological footprints two to three times the global average of 2.2 gha per capita.

Data Limitations

The analysis is based primarily on data published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Energy Agency (IEA), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC). Other data sources include studies in peer reviewed science journals or thematic collections. The Ecological Footprint methodology is in constant development, adding detail and better data as they become available.

The results presented tend to underestimate human demand on nature and overestimate the available biocapacity by:

• choosing the more conservative estimates when in doubt (e.g. carbon absorption estimates)
• excluding human activities for which there are insufficient data (e.g. acid rain)
• excluding those activities that systematically erode nature’s capacity to regenerate such as uses of materials for which the biosphere has no apparent significant assimilation capacity (e.g. plutonium, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)) and processes that irreversibly damage the biosphere (e.g. species extinction, fossil-aquifer depletion, deforestation, desertification).

Issues for which this is an indicator and why

Human Settlements — Pressures created by human settlements on the environment - General 

The ecological footprint is a tool used to measure ecological sustainability and tracks past and present demands made by people on the earth’s renewable natural resources. It tracks how much a settlement, country or humanity as a whole consumes and compares this amount to the resources nature can provide. More precisely, it shows how much biologically productive land and water area a given population occupies to produce all the resources it consumes and to absorb its waste, using prevailing technology. The global Ecological Footprint changes with population size, average consumption per person, and resource efficiency.

Further Information

• World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 
• New South Wales State of the Environment Report 2003 
• Victoria’s ecological footprint