Increased
awareness about environmental issues including global warming, deforestation,
pollution etc have resulted not only in
depth analysis of these issues but also motivated the researchers to devise
methods to quantify the services
provided by the nature. In contrast to economic indicator or GDP , the latest tools for measuring ecological values of various services have
facilitated to accord more priority to
the environmental sector for policy makers and administrators to tune their interventions in
order to make them more sustainable and eco friendly.
These
two measures are Ecological footprint and Bio- capacity and also called as
"EF" and "BC" in short.
The
ecological footprint(EF) is a
measure of the load imposed by a given population on nature. In other words it
is the area of the earth which is
required to meet the levels of
resource consumption on sustainable
basis including waste discharge by that population.
Bio-capacity (BC) in simple words means
the biological productive capacity of a
resource. (e.g. agriculture land, pasture, forest, productive sea).
Both
the Ecological Footprint and bio-capacity are measured in terms of global hectares
(g ha), which represent a hectare of land with average productive bio-capacity.
In
other words EF and BC are
equivalent to the economic concepts of
demand and supply. When used together, they form the EF/BC accounts. EF/BC
accounting is frequently referred to only as EF accounting.
The
EF/BC accounts are formed by combining the EF and the BC, thereby turning the
approach into a more complete accounting tool for natural resources. The algebraic difference between
BC and EF is called Ecological Deficit, if it is negative or Ecological Reserve
if it is positive.
In
2008, the Earth’s total bio-capacity was 12.0 billion gha, or 1.8 gha per
person, while humanity’s Ecological Footprint was 18.2 billion gha, or 2.7 gha
per person. This discrepancy means it would take 1.5 years for the Earth to
fully regenerate the renewable resources that people used in one year.
Global
Foot Print networks has assessed the trends in Ecological foot print and bio
capacity per person between 1961 & 2008 which is shown below.
The
major issues concerning both the EF and BC are that while the increasing GHG
emissions and other environmental problems
causing increasing global temperatures, climate change,
land degradation and ocean acidification
putting enormous stresses on
biodiversity and ecosystems. This affects
the bio-capacity of the earth very badly.
Same time the increased exploitation of resources for burgeoning
population is increasing the EF at an unprecedented rate. The more is the gap
between the EF and BC ,more we are near to exhausting our
resources and collapse of ecosystems due to this overshoot i.e., shortfall
in earth’s biological capacity to meet
the consumption demands of all humanity.
