By communicating sustainability and environmental issues in a very simple way the Ecological Footprint has helped to reignite the debate on human carrying capacity and raise environmental consciousness on the resource limitations of the one planet we have.
As of today, the Ecological Footprint is the only resource accounting tool that shows humans’ connectivity with nature by providing concrete answers to questions like:
The answers to these questions are of fundamental importance for both planning national policies on sustainable consumption and raising awareness on natural resources limitation. The Ecological Footprint method can be used alone, or together with other indicators, to provide an overall picture of the environmental consequences of the socio-economic patterns of societies.
Being an aggregate indicator, the Ecological Footprint has the ability to convert a large amount of information in a single number but, unlike other economic-based aggregate indices, such as GDP or GNP, it includes economic, ecological and social issues and looks at the interrelationships existing among them.
Because of its interdisciplinary nature, the Ecological Footprint can be used to give insight into several issues such as climate change, fisheries and forest depletion, urban planning, energy demand, global trade movements, food security and land use changes, etc.
Although the Ecological Footprint method was first developed as a nation-level tool, Footprint analyses have been performed at scales ranging from single products to cities and from regions to the world as a whole. National Ecological Footprint accounts are applied directly and data extracted from these accounts often serve as a starting point for smaller scale analyses.