A modified ecological footprint method and its application to Australia

Abstract

We present a new calculation of Australia's ecological footprint. Modifications have been made to the concept as originally proposed, in response to its perceived shortcomings: rather than characterising the consumption of the Australian population in terms of appropriated ‘bioproduction’ at world-average productivity, a regional, disturbance-based approach is taken, including actual Australian land use and emissions data. We consider greenhouse gases other than CO 2 and emission sources other than energy use. We re-classify land use and introduce a weighting system to describe the degree of land disturbance. For our calculations, we employ a single-region, static, partially closed input–output framework. Australia's ecological footprint is determined based on actual land use as well as on land disturbance. We set up National Greenhouse Gas and Ecological Footprint Accounts distinguishing imports, domestic consumption, and exports. We investigate variations of the ecological footprint with demographic factors such as income, expenditure, size, and location of households, and draw some policy implications from our results. When determined based on actual land use on all types of land, Australia's ecological footprint is about 13.6 hectares per capita (ha/cap), which is considerably larger than results obtained in previous studies. After weighting, a land disturbance of 7.2 ha/cap is obtained. The per-capita ecological footprint shows a correlation with household expenditure, which can be described by an elasticity η E=0.64. Furthermore, the per-capita ecological footprint decreases noticeably with household size.