Ecological footprint of European countries

Indicator definition

The ecological footprint of Europe is a proxy measure of the amount of biologically productive land and water areas that Europe requires to produce all the biological resources it consumes and to absorb the emissions it generates, using prevailing technology and management strategies. These areas could be located anywhere in the world. This can be compared with the biocapacity of the planet or the biocapacity available within a given region.

Units

Global hectares (gha) per person.

Policy context and targets

Context description

This indicator provides a quantitative assessment of global and local overshoots, i.e. the extent to which humanity's footprint, or demand for ecosystem resources, exceeds biocapacity and the planet's ability to regenerate these resources. The global overshoot means that ecosystem stocks are being liquidated and untreated wastes are accumulating in the biosphere. While it is not known precisely how long various ecosystems can tolerate this growing ecological deficit, it is predicted that the increasing pressure will eventually contribute to ecosystem degradation or failure.

National ecological footprint accounting provides a number of key indicators such as the footprint of consumption, the footprint of production and the biocapacity of a nation. Hence, it can provide assessments of aspects such as (1) Europe's demands on land and sea areas within its own borders; (2) Europe's demands on the land and sea areas outside its borders; and (3) Europe's demand on specific ecosystem types. Although the aggregate consumption of material resources by European households is more than double the available biocapacity within Europe, Europe's domestic extraction of biological resources is still below Europe's total biocapacity as a result of imports from other regions and has remained at about the same level in recent years.

Relationship of the indicator to the focal area

The 'ecological footprint of European countries' (i.e. the consumption footprint) directly measures Europe's resource use compared with what is available globally. In other words, it shows to what extent the level of consumption is replicable on a global scale. It can also be used to measure local extraction rates. This means that ecological footprint accounting can provide information on global and local sustainability.

Targets

2020 EU biodiversity targets: Target 6

Related policy documents

• EU 2020 Biodiversity Strategy
  in the Communication: Our life insurance, our natural capital: an EU biodiversity strategy to 2020 (COM(2011) 244) the European Commission has adopted a new strategy to halt the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services in the EU by 2020. There are six main targets, and 20 actions to help Europe reach its goal. The six targets cover: - Full implementation of EU nature legislation to protect biodiversity - Better protection for ecosystems, and more use of green infrastructure - More sustainable agriculture and forestry - Better management of fish stocks - Tighter controls on invasive alien species - A bigger EU contribution to averting global biodiversity loss

Methodology

Methodology for indicator calculation

National Footprint Accounts (NFAs) provide the core data required for all ecological footprint analyses. The accounts measure the ecological resource use and resource capacity of nations over time. Based on approximately 15,000 data points per country per year, the accounts calculate the footprints of more than 200 countries, territories, and regions from 1961 to the present.

National Footprint Account calculations are based on United Nations or UN-affiliated datasets, including those published by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database, and the UN Statistics Division, as well as the International Energy Agency. Supplementary data sources include studies in peer-reviewed science journals and thematic collections (books).

For general data and methodology, see https://www.footprintnetwork.org/resources/data 

A more detailed description of the methodology can be found in a paper by Borucke et al (2013).

The most recent description of the accounting methodology and results by Lin et al. (2018), based on the 2018 edition of the National Footprint Accounts, reviews the evolution of the National Footprint Accounts, describes and quantifies the effects of data and methodological improvements that have been implemented in the accounts since the 2012 edition, and reviews the latest global trends.

The calculations of the 2019 edition of the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts is explained in the Guidebook to the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts 2019, available at https://www.footprintnetwork.org/content/uploads/2019/05/National_Footprint_Accounts_Guidebook_2019.pdf

Geographical coverage:

EU-27 + UK: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden plus the United Kingdom

EEA-39: 27 EU Member States and the United Kingdom with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland and Turkey. Results for Iceland, Kosovo (UNSCR 1244/99) and Liechtenstein are excluded due to the low reliability of ecological footprint and biocapacity data.

Pan Europe: Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, North Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Uzbekistan. Results for Andorra, Iceland, Kosovo (UNSCR 1244/99), Liechtenstein, Monaco and San Marino have been excluded due to the low reliability of ecological footprint and biocapacity data.

Methodology for gap filling

Some minimal data cleaning excludes extreme outliers. In addition, if data points are missing between reported years, the gaps are filled by extrapolating from adjacent years.

Methodology references

• Accounting for demand and supply of the biosphere's regenerative capacity: The National Footprint Accounts’ underlying methodology and framework Borucke, M., Moore, D., Cranston, G., Gracey, K., Iha, K., et al., 2013. Accounting for demand and supply of the biosphere’s regenerative capacity: the National Footprint Accounts’ underlying methodology and framework. Ecological Indicators 24, 518–533.
• Ecological Footprint accounting for countries: updates and results of the National Footprint Accounts, 2012-2018. Lin D., Hanscom L., Murthy A., Galli A., Evans M., Neill E., Mancini M.S., Martindill J., Medouar F.-Z., Huang S., Wackernagel M. (2018). Resources, 7 (3), 58.

Uncertainties

Methodology uncertainty

The methodology for ecological footprint accounting is based on six assumptions:
1. Annual amounts of biological resources consumed and wastes generated by countries are tracked by national and international organisations.
2. The quantity of biological resources appropriated for human use is directly related to the amount of bioproductive land area necessary for their regeneration and for the assimilation of wastes.
3. By weighting each area in proportion to its inherent ability to regenerate biomass, the different areas can be expressed in terms of a standardised average productive hectare (a global hectare).
4. The overall demand in global hectares can be aggregated by adding all mutually exclusive resource-providing and waste-assimilating areas required to support the demand.
5. Aggregated human demand (ecological footprint) and nature's supply (biocapacity) can be directly compared to each other.
6. Area demand can exceed area supply.

The ecological footprint makes apparent the gap between human demand and regeneration. Likely, the accounts provide underestimates. On the demand side, UN data sets do not completely document all demands. On the biocapacity side, availability may be exaggerated since some overuses are not factored into the assessment due to lack of consistent data. Such aspects include soil erosion, groundwater depletion and loss in forest productivity due to increased forest fires and pestilence.

Data sets uncertainty

Ecological footprint accounts are created by aggregating UN statistics. They are aggregated based on the underlying research question, tracking competing demands on biologically productive areas. This basic accounting produces results that are as reliable as the underlying data set. Since the underlying data set does not declare confidence levels, they cannot be determined either for the aggregate.

Rationale uncertainty

Main limitations of the indicator

Several important aspects of sustainable use/management are not measured by the ecological footprint:

• Non-ecological aspects of sustainability: having a footprint smaller than the biosphere is a necessary minimum condition for a sustainable society, but it is not sufficient. For instance, the ecological footprint does not consider social well-being. In addition, on the resource side, even if the ecological footprint is within biocapacity, poor management can still lead to depletion. A footprint smaller than biocapacity is merely a necessary condition for making quality improvements replicable and scalable.
• Depletion of non-renewable resources: the footprint does not track the amount of non-renewable resource stocks, such as oil, natural gas, coal or metal deposits. The footprint associated with these materials is based on the regenerative capacity used or compromised by their extraction and, in the case of fossil fuels, the area required to assimilate the wastes they generate.
• Inherently unsustainable activities: activities that are inherently unsustainable, such as the release of heavy metals, radioactive materials and persistent synthetic compounds (e.g. chlordane, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), dioxins, etc.), do not enter directly into footprint calculations. These are activities that need to be phased out independently of their quantity (there is no biocapacity budget for using them). Where these substances cause a loss of biocapacity, however, their influence can be seen.
• Ecological degradation: the footprint does not directly measure ecological degradation, such as increased soil salinity from irrigation, which could affect future bioproductivity. However, if degradation leads to reductions in bioproductivity, then this loss is captured when measuring biocapacity in the future. Moreover, by looking at only the aggregate figure, 'under-exploitation' in one area (e.g. forests) can hide over-exploitation in another area (e.g. fisheries).
• Resilience of ecosystems: footprint accounts do not identify where and in what way the capacity of ecosystems are vulnerable or resilient. The footprint is merely an outcome measure documenting how much of the biosphere is being used compared with how productive it is.