EE/GG 275

Lab Exercise 4

The Ecological Footprint

Overall Objective: To Estimate Your own Ecological Footprint.

Introduction

The Ecological Footprint measures the amount of nature's resources an individual, a community, or a country consumes in a given year. In this lab you will use the data you collected this weekend on your consumption habits and translate that into the amount of biologically productive land and water area required to produce the resources consumed and to assimilate the wastes you generated. Remember that the productivity values used in the model are global averages.

Data Sources

You should base your analysis on the data you collected this weekend - and use that data to estimate how much you consume per month and per day of each consumption item. 

The Model

The model you will use is saved in our class folder on CASFS1, and is called EF-Household-evaluation.xls.

Despite the model is provided to you, I expect you to go over the entire model and to understand the calculations behind each value.

Task

  1. Open up the model and make sure that you understand how it works. In particular you need to understand:
    1. How does to model translate consumption of a particular item into land areas.
    2. What do the correction factors mean/do?
    3. How to interpret the land-use consumption matrix.
    4. How is the ecological footprint distribution matrix estimated?
  1. Estimate your own ecological footprint, in hectares - per month and per day.
    1. What are the largest contributing consumption items to your EF.
    2. What would be the best way to reduce your EF? - Be very realistic here - how would you actually do this?
  1. Assume that everyone in the United States has your consumption habits. How big is the Ecological footprint for the entire US population - in hectares per month and per day?
  1. Estimate the Sustainability factor for the United States - using only the land area available to us here in the US, not abroad.  
  1. Write a full lab report, where the results section should consist of the answers given in items 2, 3 and 4. In the discussion part of the report discuss the following:
    1. How would you use the EF to plan for sustainable development?
    2. What do you see as the disadvantages of the EF estimation method as presented in the model you just used? Why? Could we fix this?