Mathis Wackernagel
Mathis Wackernagel est président du Global Footprint Network.
Michel Rocard, former Prime Minister of France and a former leader of the Socialist Party, is a member of the European Parliament.
Fred Pearce is journalist specialized in the environment and development. He was born in the United Kingdom and studied geography in the University of Cambridge. His latest book is When the Rivers...
Carl Pope, chairman and former executive director of the Sierra Club, has served on the boards for the National Clean Air Coalition, California Common Cause, and Public Interest Economics Inc. A...
Mahmoud Mohieldin is Managing Director at the World Bank Group, and was formerly Egypt’s minister for investment.
Mathis Wackernagel est président du Global Footprint Network.
Rob Hopkins est le fondateur du mouvement Transition Towns qui vise à élaborer des villes plus durables dotées d'une économie relocalisée et capable d'être en partie auto suffisantes pour la...
Jeffrey David Sachs (United States): Distinguished American economist. Mr Sachs is Director of the Earth Institute, as well as a professor of sustainable development and health policy and management...
Juriste de formation, Derek Bok a d'abord enseigné le droit à l'Université d'Harvard avant d'être élu président de l’université de 1971 à 1991 puis de 2006 à 2007. Il a écrit plusieurs livres, dont...
Bill Drayton is chairman and CEO of Ashoka, the largest network of leading social entrepreneurs in the world. As a student at Harvard, Oxford, and Yale Law School, he founded a number of...
Jimmy Carter is a former President of the United States and the founder of the nonprofit Carter Center in Atlanta.
Jeffrey David Sachs (United States): Distinguished American economist. Mr Sachs is Director of the Earth Institute, as well as a professor of sustainable development and health policy and management...
A l’origine maître d’armes, Nathalie Durand enseigne l’escrime pour les valides et les handisports. Diplômée en management international du sport, elle mène depuis 1996 des études et des actions...
Serge Orru est le directeur général du WWF France.Photo : © AFP PHOTO FRANK PERRY
Andrew Simms (United Kingdom): New Economic Foundation’s (NEF) Policy Director and head of the Climate Change program at the Centre for Global Interdependence. He has worked for a variety of...
Carl Zimmer travaille comme journaliste spécialiste des questions scientifiques et environnementales. Il a rédigé 6 livres et s’intéresse à des domaines aussi variés que la recherche dans les...
Elisabeth Rosenthal has covered international environmental issues for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune for the last three years, traveling extensively to report on...
George Monbiot is a well-known investigation reporter and columnist for the British newspaper “The Guardian” as well as a member of the BBC Wildlife magazine’s advisory board. He is also the author...
Edgar Morin is a sociologist and a philosopher. He is the author of “Pour entrer dans le XXIe” (Entering the XXIst century) (Seuil, 2004)
Paul and Anne Ehrlich are in the Department of Biology and the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, where he is Bing Professor of Population Studies and Professor of Biological...
Yann Arthus-Bertrand is a famous photographer. He has always had a passion for the animal world and the natural environment. In 1991 he founded Altitude, the world’s first aerial photography agency...
Professor emeritus in economy at Université de Lille 1, he is a member of the French CNIS (National Council of statistical information) and of the Stiglitz' commission, which shoud propose new...
Jean-Michel SEVERINO has been CEO of France’s international development agency (AFD) since 2001. After graduating from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de...
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations. It was founded on 16 October 1945 in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. In 1951 its...
Tony Juniper is a recognized environmentalist, author and news analyst. He served as Director of Friends of the Earth-UK and Vice-Chair of Friends of the Earth International from 2000 to 2008. Photo...
Serge Latouche is emeritus professor of economy at the University of Paris. He is also a spokesman of the degrowth theory. He chairs the Groupe de recherche en anthropologie, épistémologie et...
Footprint onto the dashboard!
03/11/2011 3:13 pm
Aircrafts without a fuel gauge on their dashboard are dangerous. They are fine for take-off. But once in the air and flying for some time, it is good to know how much is left in the plane’s kerosene tank. Is it enough for reaching our destination, or should we land before?
To my amazement however, the dashboard of our economy has no "fuel gauge." Although all economic activities depend on resources from nature, policy debates and performance indicators of countries (by the countries and by most international institutions) lack any measure that tell us how much nature a country or a region has and how much their population uses.
For economies, the regenerative capacity of nature – or its biocapacity – is the limiting “fuel”, or as economist say, their limiting “production factor.” Even our use of fossil energy is constrained by biocapacity due to nature’s limited absorptive capacity for its waste: CO2. Fossil fuel is far less limited by its availability under ground, simply because we have found already too much. If all the fossil fuels already found – gas, oil and coal – would be burnt, the carbon concentration in the atmosphere would rise to 1700 ppm. Currently we are at 380 ppm just for CO2, and, over 400 ppm if we also include non-CO2 greenhouse gases. In contrast, climate scientists advise, not to exceed 450 ppm in order not to exceed a temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius (and many more recent climate models have revised the threshold down to 350ppm). In other words, from a climate perspective, there is no more room for fossil fuel use, and many alternatives to fossil fuel will compete for biocapacity as well, making biocapacity even more of a limiting factor.
France, for example, requires 70 percent times more biocapacity than there is France. Since France is well endowed with biocapacity compared to world average, France’s Footprint – or resource demand per resident – is nearly three times more than there is per capita in the world.
This assessment has been confirmed by over a dozen separate government studies around the world, including the French government, where SOES (Service de l'observation et des statistiques) recalculated the Footprint for France using our method. They were able to replicate our time series for France from 1961 to 2005 within 1-3 percent. (Commissariat général au développement durable, Service de l'observation et des statistiques, Une expertise de l’empreinte écologique, Études & documents n°16, Janvier 2010).
In an age of increasing resource constraints and global overshoot, wanting ever more from the world is becoming a risky strategy. Particularly for countries where the purchasing power per person is decreasing relative to the world. Such as in France.1
Footprint onto the dashboard!
by Mathis Wackernagel
text- courtesy of the 'auteur
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