The Ecological Footprint (EF) as the Indicator of Societies Sustainability

With the publication of the Brundtland Report carried the sustainability discussion into governments and businesses worldwide, much effort has gone into clarifying the meaning of the sustainability concept. To make the concept measurable and applied city sustainable idea, some new method was needed. So the method named ecological footprint has been presented.The ecological footprint method that developed by professor William Rees and D.r Mathis Wackernagel in the early 1990s. Accounting index that translates human resource demand to the land area required to produce the resources needed and sequester of CO2 or dispose of wastes. In this context, Rees and Wackernagel simply defined sustainability as living peacefully in relate comfort and with nature. The ecological footprint was originally conceived as a simple and elegant method for comparing the sustainability of resource use among different populations. It is now a widely consider as the indicator of sustainable development. Ecological Footprinting translates resource consumption into the land area required to sustain it, and allows for an average per capita Ecological footprint for a region or nation to be compared with the global average. Finally the consumption of these populations is converted into a single index called the land area. This area is then compared to the actual area of productive land that the given population inhabits, and the degree of unsustainability is calculated as the difference between available and required land. Unsustainable populations are simply populations with a higher ecological footprint than available land. It was also proposed that ecological footprints could be used for policies future of design and planning. Ecological footprints calculated according to this original method became important educational and planning tools in highlighting the unsustainability of global consumption.