Abstract
The increasing rate of urbanization along with its socio-environmental impact are major global challenges. Therefore, there is a need to assess the boundaries to growth for the future development of cities by the inclusion of the assessment of the environmental carrying capacity (ECC) into spatial management. The purpose is to assess the resource dependence of a given entity. ECC is usually assessed based on indicators such as the ecological footprint (EF) and biocapacity (BC). EF is a measure of the biologically productive areas demanded by human consumption and waste production. Such areas include the space needed for regenerating food and fibers as well as sequestering the generated pollution, particularly CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels. BC reflects the biological regeneration potential of a given area to regenerate resources as well to absorb waste. The city level EF assessment has been applied to urban zones across the world, however, there is a noticeable lack of urban EF assessments in Central Eastern Europe. Therefore, the current research is a first estimate of the EF and BC for the city of Wrocław, Poland. This study estimates the Ecological Footprint of Food (EFF) through both a top-down assessment and a hybrid top-down/bottom-up assessment. Thus, this research verifies also if results from hybrid method could be comparable with top-down approach. The bottom-up component of the hybrid analysis calculated the carbon footprint of food using the life cycle assessment (LCA) method. The top-down result of Wrocław’s EFF were 1% greater than the hybrid EFF result, 0.974 and 0.963 gha per person respectively. The result indicated that the EFF exceeded the BC of the city of Wrocław 10-fold. Such assessment support efforts to increase resource efficiency and decrease the risk associated with resources—including food security. Therefore, there is a need to verify if a city is able to satisfy the resource needs of its inhabitants while maintaining the natural capital on which they depend intact.
Highlights
The increasing rate of urbanization along with its socio-environmental impact are major global challenges [1,2]
This paper focuses on the assessment of one of the components of the EF—the ecological footprint of food (EFF ) which is expressed in terms of global hectares
Using the EFF top-down method (Table 3), the results show that the categories of meat; milk, cheese, and eggs; and bread and cereals, are the main contributors to the total EFF
Summary
The increasing rate of urbanization along with its socio-environmental impact are major global challenges [1,2]. The deterioration of the environment is expected to increase in the future due to the growth of human population, especially in urban areas [4]. The United Nations indicated that currently over 55% of the world’s population lives in urbanized areas, and this percentage is expected to increase to 68% by the year 2050 [5]. This means that the world’s urban population might well rise from 4.2 billion people (2018) to 6.7 billion people in 2050 [5]. The current rate of urban growth underscores the importance of urban areas as the focus of sustainability assessments [7]. The inclusion of the assessment of environmental carrying capacity (ECC) into the spatial management and planning of cities can be a useful tool for the development of sustainable human settlements [9]
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