The 13^th Earth Overshoot Day, on August 1st, received 3 billion media impressions in more than 100 countries. The most significant breakthrough occurred in our own backyard, the United States, thanks to our amazing local partners. For the first time ever, we ran an ad in iconic Times Square, New York, for two weeks leading up to Earth Overshoot Day. This was made possible by filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg who graciously provided imagery. On Earth Overshoot Day, our two live stream programs took viewers to meet more than 20 sustainability leaders and hear about their initiatives around the world to #MoveTheDate. Watch all the interviews here.

Portugal brought Footprinting to a new level in 2018, thanks to the City Footprint Project led by our partner ZERO. Global Footprint Network Mediterranean Director Alessandro Galli and I (Mathis) joined the road tour in October as the six cities participating in this three-year initiative unveiled their data at public events. The next step is developing the Footprint Calculator for each city this year. The intention is to impact national policies with a view to rewarding those municipalities that strive to transform their economy by using the one-planet prosperity framework to guide their efforts. Read more about the ambition driving this initiative.

Businesses also are embracing the one-planet prosperity framework. The most visionary companies understand that their long-term success depends on their business model being aligned with the necessary goal of living well within the means of our one planet. We have refined this business rational together with Schneider Electric, one of the world’s leading energy efficiency companies that is driving decarbonization. We estimated that if their kind of technology was applied consistently around the world, Earth Overshoot Day would move back 21 days, without any loss of comfort. In partnership with the Dutch Consulate, we gathered business leaders for a conversation about driving success in a one-planet context during the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco last September. Opened by the first woman president of Ecuador, Rosalia Arteaga, it featured giants like Schneider Electric and Philips, as well as newcomers like Lightyear. Here’s the summary of the one-planet event.

Last but not least, 2018 is the year Global Footprint Network launched a collaboration with York University, Toronto, to build an independent organization for the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts. The Initiative guarantees the Footprint Accounts’ independence, transparency, and robustness thanks to a global academic network and a scientific advisory committee. This will be a major focus of our work over the upcoming year, while we also advance our fearless and productive engagement around the world.

We are excited about the new possibilities before us and we look forward to keeping you updated on our work throughout 2019 as we keep pushing to #MoveTheDate.

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The EU-funded project, called DestiMED, brings together a network of 13 protected areas in six Mediterranean countries to collectively develop, manage, and promote ecotourism. The first of seven pilot tests taking place this fall for the project will launch on Sept. 25. As part of the pilot tests, local teams have created new ecotourism packages, and will be welcoming a group of industry experts who will evaluate and provide feedback on the quality and market viability of the packages.

With the help of the experts, the local teams also will help collect data for an innovative approach to measuring and reducing the environmental impact of tourism on the natural resources that sustain protected area communities. This new tool is based on the Ecological Footprint framework.

“The project gives us with the opportunity to test a novel application of the Ecological Footprint,” says Alessandro Galli, Global Footprint Network’s director of the Mediterranean and MENA regions. “We hope to prove with numbers that ecotourism really has a lower pressure on the planet.”

DestiMED builds on the success of a previous project called the MEET Network (Mediterranean Experience of Ecotourism). MEET has now been established as a non-profit Destination Management Organization, and is focused on further developing and promoting a high-quality portfolio of protected area ecotourism experiences in the region.

“Our aim is to interact constructively with our natural resources and to broadcast our legacy positively, while protecting the River Ebre as an icon of our lands,” said Josep Aragonés, Terres de l’Ebre Biosphere Reserve Director. “For this reason, projects like DestiMED that advocate sustainable tourism are fully aligned with our objectives as a protected area.”

The seven protected areas participating in the fall tests are:

Colline Metallifere Tuscan Mining Park (Italy)
Kornati National Park (Croatia)
Menorca Biosphere Reserve (Spain)
Nature Park Lastovo Islands (Croatia)
Samaria National Park, Crete (Greece)
Terres De L´Ebre Biosphere Reserve (Spain)
Torre del Cerrano Marine Park (Italy)

Additional Resources

IUCN DestiMed Website
Global Footprint Network Mediterranean Initiative
Report: How can Mediterranean societies thrive in an era of decreasing resources?

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That’s a novel concept that will be tested by six cities in Portugal as part of a three-year project with Global Footprint Network, Portuguese NGO ZERO-Associação Sistema Terrestre Sustentável, University of Aveiro, University of Coimbra, and University of Porto.

During the first year of the project, the Ecological Footprints and biocapacities of the six cities—Almada (pictured above), Bragança, Castelo Branco, Guimarães, Lagoa, and Vila Nova de Gaia—will be measured to establish a baseline. The Ecological Footprint measures the city’s demand for natural resources and carbon dioxide sequestration, while biocapacity measures the capacity of the city’s natural resources to meet that demand. These measures will then be used to help guide the cities’ sustainability policies.

During the second year, calculators will be developed for the six cities by Global Footprint Network and project partners to allow citizens to measure their personal Ecological Footprints. The calculator will be used as a springboard to catalyze local workshops and roundtables with other NGOs and citizens to discuss the implications of Footprint results as well as mitigation and policy options.

In the final years of the project, an alternative approach for national budget allocation will be proposed for the participating cities, based on the size of their Ecological Footprints and biocapacities relative to those of Portugal.

ZERO President Francisco Ferreira told Lusa news agency that national funding for cities considers such issues as protected areas but should go further. “Above all, the actions and the effort that municipalities take to reduce this Footprint can be rewarded,” Ferreira said (as translated from an article in DN).

“The collaboration between Global Footprint Network, ZERO, and the Portuguese universities aims to broaden the possible fields of application of this tool of assessment and monitoring of sustainability that is recognized worldwide,” Paulo Magalhães, coordinator of the project, leader of ZERO, and a researcher at the Faculty of Law of the University of Porto said in an article in the Portuguese publication Expresso.

“As we continue explore the application of the Ecological Footprint at the city level, this project is another step in the direction of a worldwide system of sub-national Ecological Footprint accounts,” added David Lin, director of research and head of Global Footprint Network’s city program.

Sara Moreno Pires, a researcher at the University of Aveiro, added, “I would like many municipalities to get involved in this project because the information that exists at the local level is very scarce, there is little environmental knowledge at the level of the municipalities.”

Eduardo Rodrigues, mayor of Vila Nova de Gaia, one of the six municipalities involved in this first phase of the project and Portugal’s third largest city, explained that “climate change is a global problem, but its approach must begin at the local level.”

A memorandum of understanding for the project was signed during an event in the house of the presidency of Vila Nova de Gaia City Hall on Sept. 5. The project will begin in January 2018.

Additional Resources

ZERO Press Release (in Portuguese)

ZERO e 6 municípios portugueses lançam projeto inédito a nível mundial para calcular Payada Ecológica, Expresso, 2 Sept. 2017

Zero desafia Governo a transferir verbas para câmaras em função da pegada ecológica, DN, 5 Sept. 2017

Seis municípios vat calcular pegada ecológica em projeto proviso pela Zero, RTP Notícias, 2 Sept. 2017

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In December 2006, Switzerland became the first country to work with Global Footprint Network to examine and understand its Ecological Footprint and biocapacity results. Since then, more than a dozen other countries have followed suit. The Swiss government published the initial review in a report titled Switzerland’s Ecological Footprint – A Contribution to the Sustainability Debate. The report and its technical background study were written by INFRAS, a leading Swiss policy research institute.,  By comparing the international data sources used by Global Footprint Network to the statistics used by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office, they concluded that the data sets were largely consistent. A second review in 2018 reconfirmed Global Footprint Network’s results with a very small margin of difference (shown in Figure 70 on page 87 of the technical report).

The Federal Office of Spatial Development and the Statistical Office used the Ecological Footprint in the Swiss government’s “Sustainable Development Report 2012” launched at Rio+20 (page 54). The Ecological Footprint also went on to become an official indicator in Switzerland’s sustainable development monitoring system, and since 2008, it has been published annually by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office. They maintain a webpage with key statistics on the Swiss Footprint and recognize that “almost three planet Earths would be needed if everyone lived like the Swiss population”.  The Swiss Federal Office for the Environment also maintains a webpage about Switzerland’s Ecological Footprint results.

In 2014, BakBasel and Global Footprint Network were invited by the Swiss government to explore The Significance of Global Resource Availability to Swiss Competitiveness, which was presented in a report of the same name and is available in English (3 MB),  German (3 MB) and French (3 MB). It was the focus of the Swiss Sustainable Development Dialogues in 2014 (with presentations available in French and German).

In the fall 2016, Switzerland made history as the first country to vote on whether to implement a green economy into its constitution, with the goal of living within the means of one planet by 2050, based on Ecological Footprint accounting. 36% of the voters were in favor and more information about this historic vote is available in French and German.

To advance this conversation, Global Footprint Network invited Switzerland with a proposal “Watch Out, dear Switzerland” that outlines how Switzerland could tackle its growing resource fragility.

Click here to learn about Switzerland’s ecological performance

“I strongly commend Global Footprint Network for advancing such a comprehensive resource accounting system. This tool is critical for building a sustainable and prosperous future”
MAYA GRAF, former President and current member of the National Council of Switzerland

Resources

You can find more information about Global Footprint Network-Switzerland here.

Switzerland Fact Sheet with key data about Switzerland’s ecological performance.

achtung-schweiz.org: Global Footprint Network’s proposal for a resource secure Switzerland. Produced originally in 2016 in the context of the Swiss vote on a “green economy”.

How Switzerland made history with green economy vote. Global Footprint Network Blog Post (2016)

Switzerland’s ecological footprint, Swiss Federal Statistical Office, 2020.

Earth Overshoot Day perspective for Switzerland.

Switzerland’s ecological footprint: A contribution to the sustainability debate, Federal Office for Spatial Development / Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation / Federal Statistical Office / Federal Office for the Environment, 2006.

Environmental Footprints of Switzerland, Swiss Federal Office for the Environment, 2018.

«Ab heute leben wir auf Pump», Neue Zürcher Zeitung, July 30, 2019, (German).

«Mathis Wackernagel: “Privilegien und Resignation – ein toxisches Gemisch“», swissinfo, Mach 2022. (English, French, Italian, Portuguese)

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Global Footprint Network has been collaborating closely with the government throughout the process, starting in February 2015, when we were first engaged by Montenegro’s Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism to assess the country’s Ecological Footprint and biocapacity. This year, Global Footprint Network was also helped Montenegro develop a monitoring framework to guide and support progress of NSSD until 2030.

“The Ecological Footprint is an extremely useful indicator to ensure that socio-economic development succeeds without putting additional pressure on our valuable national resources, thus supporting Montenegro on its path to sustainability,” said Jelena Knezevic, Head of the Division for Sustainable Development and Integrated Management of Sea and Coastal Area, Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism of Montenegro.

Findings

Global Footprint Network presented the findings of Montenegro’s Ecological Footprint study to the National Council on Sustainable Development, Climate Change, and Integrated Coastal Zone Management last December. Its co-chairs were President Filip Vujanović and then-Minister of Sustainable Development and Tourism Branimir Gvozdenović.

Our study found that Montenegro is currently using 45 percent more renewable natural resources than the nation’s ecosystems can regenerate. The country’s household consumption makes up 75 percent of the national Ecological Footprint. Although Montenegro enjoys one of the lowest ecological deficits in Europe, changing lifestyle and imports—which are increasing to keep up with raising consumption levels and improved lifestyles—are causing the national ecological deficit to widen.

Global Footprint Network has also calculated that carbon emissions, which require forests to be absorbed, make up 56 percent of Montenegro’s total Ecological Footprint.

The two biggest drivers of Montenegro’s Ecological Footprint are carbon-intensive transportation and food consumption. Therefore Global Footprint Network has recommended that policies addressing fuel efficiency and the food system be prioritized as a first step towards sustainability.

Visionary Sustainability Agenda

NSSD until 2030 sets up a visionary agenda for sustainability that is centered on the Sustainable Development Goals that were adopted by the United Nations in September 2015. As such, it places Montenegro in the company of only 22 countries who have committed to conduct a national review of their planning process to enable implementing the global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the national level. Among these, only a handful so far—including Montenegro and Colombia—have actually included SDGs in their national policy.

Goals set in NSSD until 2030 include:

• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.
• Reduce the use of natural resources 20 percent below the 2005-2012 average by 2020.
• Protect 17 percent of the country’s land area by 2020 and 10 percent of the costal area by 2021.
• Collect communal waste at a 95 percent rate by 2030, with at least 50 percent of it being recycled from 2020 on.

These goals are the outcome of a long process that involved all government ministries, research and consultation with experts, and many consultations with local representatives, NGOs, and individual members of the public.

Next steps

Earlier this year, Montenegro’ Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism asked Global Footprint Network for support designing the monitoring and reporting framework of NSSD until 2030, so that progress towards sustainability can be monitored in the coming years. On July 7, the revised Montenegro’s NSSD (“NSSD until 2030”) was adopted by the government of Montenegro and moved to the implementation phase.

Next steps will include designing and implementing processes at the local level that move Montenegro closer to reaching its goals. In fact, a first workshop with stakeholders from local governments is expected to take place by early next year.

The Ministry, with Global Footprint Network’s help, also will work on a possible revision of the statistical legislation system to facilitate data collection and reporting, as well as the setting up and testing of an NSSD database and information reporting system.

Finally, the Ministry will continuously monitor the global SDGs process, keeping track of actual improvements in national indicators development, and it will set up pilot projects for some of the other composite indicators included in the NSSD monitoring framework to assess the feasibility of their introduction within the statistics system of Montenegro.

At Global Footprint Network, we envision a time when Montenegro shares best practices with other countries as they embark on their own path to sustainability.

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The government launched the Al Basma Al Beeiya (the Ecological Footprint) Initiative in 2007 to understand the numbers and methodology behind the ranking and began a multi-stakeholder collaboration involving Global Footprint Network that continues today. The initiative is currently a partnership between the Ministry of Environment and Water, the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi, Emirates Authority for Standardization and Metrology, Emirates Wildlife Society-World Wildlife Fund and Global Footprint Network with the following mission: “to ensure a sustainable future by measuring and understanding the impact of our ways of living on planet Earth.”

The launch of the Ecological Footprint Initiative set the UAE on a course to becoming the third country in the world, after Switzerland and Japan, to conduct in-depth research on its Ecological Footprint. Today the UAE initiative stands as an exemplary model for nations in using the Ecological Footprint to measure consumption patterns and guide the development of effective policies that will lead to real Footprint reductions. Some of the world’s most advanced Ecological Footprint research and most innovative Footprint-based awareness campaigns have been launched in the UAE, with support from the highest levels of government.

“The United Arab Emirates, with its rapidly expanding economy, has also become increasingly resource dependent. This is why we have developed a close collaboration with Global Footprint Network: To better understand our Ecological Footprint and biocapacity trends and the challenges we face. This collaboration has helped us foster more effective relationships between ministries, and helped us make sustainable investments. Our goal is to secure great lives for all. To succeed in this goal requires living within the means of nature.”

New Energy Standards

One of the most recent outcomes from Global Footprint Network’s collaboration with the UAE is the approval of a new energy efficiency lighting regulation in October 2013 by Sheikh Al Maktoum, the Prime Minister of the UAE. “The new lighting standard will reduce the country’s energy consumption by 340 to 500 megawatts per year, which is equivalent to not using an average gas power station for six months,” said Rashid Bin Fahed, former Minister of Environment and Water.

“This important achievement came as a result of the strong collaboration of all partners of the Ecological Footprint Initiative,” said H.E. Razan Al Mubarak, Secretary-General of Environment Agency—Abu Dhabi (EAD) in an article on the new lighting standard.

Heroes of the UAE

A key finding of the Ecological Footprint Initiative was that the household sector is the main contributor to the UAE’s Ecological Footprint, at 57 percent. These findings were applied to the development of a sustainable lifestyles campaign known as “Heroes of the UAE,” in which households were educated on ways to reduce their Footprints primarily through reducing energy and water consumption.

The Heroes of the UAE campaign, along with the Ecological Footprint Initiative, also developed a “lead-by-example” program aimed at motivating government agencies to conduct “green makeovers” for their offices. The program included workshops on the underlying environmental issues to ensure that staff members were actively engaged in reducing their Ecological Footprints. The first case study was completed in April 2010 for the Ministry of Environment and Water offices. The building underwent technical changes predicted to reduce its water consumption by 44 percent and its carbon Footprint associated with energy consumption by up to 24 percent.

From 2009 to 2010, researchers from EWS-WWF and the Masdar Institute, with technical work supported by Global Footprint Network, coordinated development scenarios to track how the inter-related water and electricity sectors might affect Abu Dhabi’s carbon dioxide emissions and the UAE’s per capita Ecological Footprint up to 2030. These scenarios assessed the impacts of increasing renewable energy use, more energy- and water-efficient equipment, and green building codes to de-carbonize the power and water sector: If the most ambitious measures were implemented in Abu Dhabi alone, by 2030 the Emirate’s CO2 emissions could be reduced by up to 40 percent and the UAE’s overall per capita Footprint could be reduced by 1 global hectare per person.

New Statistics Bureau

The Footprint Initiative highlighted the urgent need for a UAE agency that could be identified nationally and internationally as the official source of UAE data and statistics. In response to the Footprint Initiative’s recommendation for such an agency, the UAE National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) was created in 2009. Its mission: to provide “up-to-date, high quality statistical data and information, which contribute in decision making, policy design and performance evaluation.”

Latest Work

Since 2013, Global Footprint Network has continued working with the UAE EFI on addressing data challenges and mobilizing the expertise of key stakeholders. In November 2014, Global Footprint Network and Emirates Wildlife Society organized a technical workshop for key data stakeholders in the UAE. Hosted by the National Bureau of Statistics in its headquarters, the workshop featured a discussion of data collection and reporting systems and data integrity issues that impact accurate, reliable and robust Footprint calculations in the UAE. In 2016, Global Footprint Network assisted in another verification project to improve calculations given the inconsistency between national and UN statistics for the UAE.

Video

Report

Ecological Footprint Initiative Summary Report 2007-2010

Additional Resources

“Envisioning a Low Footprint Future for UAE,” newsletter feature story, 2009.

“UAE introduces indoor lighting standard: good for environment and good for economy,” WWF article on UAE lighting standard, 2014.

http://uae.panda.org/ews_wwf: WWF—UAE website.

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If everyone on Earth lived the lifestyle of the Cloughjordan Ecovillage, we would be remarkably close to living within the budget of our planet’s ecological resources. Researcher Vince Carragher’s bottom-up Ecological Footprint accounting methodology helps residents stay on track.

Seven years after construction started in the middle of Ireland, Cloughjordan Ecovillage counts 54 homes. Its solar- and wood-powered community heating system is up and running, as are the wood-oven bakery and the eco-hostel for visitors. The organic, bio-dynamic community farm, one of the largest community-supported agriculture (CSA) schemes in Ireland, caters to over 60 families; it can serve 80 when operating at full capacity.

Cloughjordan Ecovillage residents have an average Ecological Footprint per capita of only 2 global hectares (gha), according to the first Ecological Footprint survey of residents that was carried out last spring and presented to the community in November. By way of comparison, Global Footprint Network estimates that the average amount of biocapacity that is available per person on the planet is 1.7 gha.

The survey was conducted by Vincent Carragher, energy manager and research coordinator at Tipperary Energy Agency and an expert on local scale material and resource flow analysis and decarbonisation. His bottom-up approach, which he developed during his doctorate research on Ballina, an Irish community of 700 households, focuses on data collected directly from each household. It is based on the original Ecological Footprint accounting methodology developed by Mathis Wackernagel, now president of Global Footprint Network, and William Rees at the University of British Columbia, and other subsequent works.

The original methodology developed by Wackernagel and Rees calculates the Ecological Footprint based on national economic data on consumption and land use, then divides it by the number of residents to obtain the Ecological Footprint per capita. According to this approach implemented by Global Footprint Network, the average Ecological Footprint of an Irish resident is 5.5 gha – more than double that of the average Cloughjordan ecovillager as calculated with a bottom-up methodology.

“There is strong merit in the top-down approach developed by Mathis, and my major adaptation to that was to develop a locally-based, bottom-up method which sampled and reflected consumption differences at the local level,” Carragher explained.

“The huge advantage of the bottom-up approach is that it points to individual responsibility,” he told Global Footprint Network. “As such it is a tool for educating local communities and individual households, since they feel fully responsible for their Ecological Footprint and can see the impact of modifying their behavior to live more sustainably,” he added.

In this respect, Carragher and Cloughjordan Ecovillage are only getting started. “What I have released so far are the results for the average ecovillager. But it is of note that there is massive divergence within consumption categories, so [CO2] waste emissions of one person might be 10 times those of another, and this goes for all consumption categories,” Carragher said.

The Ecovillage residents are truly engaged with the process. The Ecological Footprint survey scored a response rate of 94 percent (47 of the 50 households living in the village last spring participated). And at the request of many residents, Carragher is now working on establishing the specific Ecological Footprint of each household.

Identifying individual consumption patterns will help each household focus on a tailored plan to reduce their Ecological Footprint through collaborative support and shared best practices.

“[The Footprint survey] provided an opportunity to quantify other areas of our daily lives which we hadn’t measured before—namely transport, waste and food,” resident Deirdre O’Brolchain told Global Footprint Network in an email. “Whilst our household liked to think that we were ‘eco-nscientious’ in these three areas, the survey reminded us that we’ve loads of room to improve – and that is our challenge over the coming year, and before we complete the next Ecological Footprint survey,” she continued.

The concept of Cloughjordan Ecovillage in Ireland was first sown in the 1990s. The site was acquired in 2005. Outline planning permission was granted two years later for 114 homes and 16 live/work units on 67 acres to the north of historical Cloughjordan in County Tipperary. The first residents moved into their homes in December 2009.

“People were looking especially at a more sustainable approach to food production than they could find or develop in a city,” says Carragher.

His approach to calculating the Ecological Footprint of food relies heavily on the energy used in food production (“embodied energy”) and methane emissions caused by animal farming. As such, the survey asked households to provide data related to their diet in order to evaluate their consumption of plant-based foods and animal-based foods (the latter being more resource and energy intensive). Incorporating the Ecological Footprint of non-local food consumed in the village, on the other hand, remains one of the stickiest methodology challenges, mostly due to the difficulty of tracking such data from households.

Although incomplete, the current food Ecological Footprint approach still provides reliable metrics, Carragher said. For all its recent popularity, “local food does not significantly lower the carbon and energy intensity of food,” he pointed out.

Carragher remains optimistic about further progress. He was successful in helping Ballina reduce its carbon footprint by 28 percent over four years. And he’s hopeful that the methodology that he’s been applying in Cloughjordan Ecovillage can benefit many other communities across Ireland and beyond.

Additional Resources

The Irish Times: “Cloughjordan: Inside Ireland’s only ecovillage. Estate has survived recession and teething problems; now it’s gaining European acclaim,” Dec. 11, 2015

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