The concept of the ecological footprint has been launched by the Swiss professor Wackernagel. It is expressed in hectares (1 hectare = 2471 acres). An individual's ecological footprint represents the amount of earth surface one needs, or uses, to live, work, eat, generate energy, dispose domestic waste, ...

Given the fact that only 18% of the surface of the earth can be used by humans (as the rest is desert, ice, ...), every human on the planet can only use 1.8 hectares on average to sustain himself without compromising the rest of the world population. If we want to leave some space for our fauna and flora as well, every human's share is even lower than that. The average ecological footprint per individual - worldwide - in 2001 was 2.2 hectares - or 21% more than what is available. Sounds bad, but not too bad, does it?

Unfortunately (as we all know), the use of land is not distributed equally among all people of the world. Among other things, the hunger for energy and fossile fuels and the immense production of waste in our beloved industrialized countries dramatically increases the ecological footprint of its inhabitants. The ecological footprint of an average Belgian citizen is 5.6 hectares, or over 3 times more than what's available. The ecological footprint of an average North American is almost 10 hectares (source: WWF.) Imagine what would happen when all developing countries start living according to American or European standards...

Yesterday, I calculated my own ecological footprint at iedereeneco.be (see image below, the yellow bars are the Belgian averages). It seems that the efforts we have been doing as a family during the last few years pay off, as my ecological footprint is "only" 2.8 hectares, about 50% of the Belgian average. In our household, we have quite stringent waste management control rules, we pay higher energy bills for having green electricity (I guess the additional cost is something like an iPod a year), ...

ecological footprint

We perform relatively poorly in the food department, mainly because we don't pay too much attention to where our food comes from. A lot of fruit and vegetables are imported from the other side of the world, which leads to high energy consumption for transport. So our 2008 goal is to increase the amount of locally produced foods in our shopping basket. I won't get the Nobel prize for doing so, but I think it's worth it nonetheless :)