Abstract
The contemporary lifestyle, based on unsustainable consumption patterns, leads to an orientation of the society towards the development and application of sustainable development strategies and policies. The comparative analysis of the ecological footprint and biocapacity allows one to study the interaction between human activities and environment, through the biocapacity reserve or deficit. In this context, this article carries out a complex analysis of the biocapacity reserve/deficit, as a latent variable that quantifies sustainability, viewed through a selection of determinants, from which three main components have been extracted: A component of education and social exclusion, a component of economic development, innovation, and environment, and a demographic component. These were transformed—through a multiple linear regression model—into exogenous variables with high explanatory power over the variation of the biocapacity reserve/deficit and constituted the tools in identifying behavioral patterns of the European countries and a set of measures leading to the sustainability of the ecological reserve.
Highlights
In recent decades, the pacing of environmental destruction has intensified considerably, bringing the day when human resource consumption exceeds the resource regeneration capacity closer and closer every year (“Earth Overshoot Day”)
The identification of the main determinants whose significant influence can explain the variations in biocapacity reserve/deficit is important for establishing the intervention tools on the optimization of the biocapacity deficit, in the economic, social, and environmental field
The analysis shows that a potential increase in biocapacity reserve/deficit is the result of the growth of “School_years”, “Part_educ”, and “Researchers” on the one hand and the reduction of “Underachv”, “Material deprivation rate (Mat_dep)”, and “Work_pov” on the other, all being elements of Component 1, an improved score of “Education and social exclusion” Component
Summary
The pacing of environmental destruction has intensified considerably, bringing the day when human resource consumption exceeds the resource regeneration capacity closer and closer every year (“Earth Overshoot Day”). That is why numerous studies in the specialized literature have focused on the analysis of variables that reflect the environment state and its interaction with human activities: Ecological footprint and biocapacity. According to the Global Footprint Network, ecological footprint can be defined as: „A measure of how much area of biologically productive land and water an individual, population or activity requires to produce all the resources it consumes and to absorb the waste it generates, using prevailing technology and resource management practices”, while—according to the same source—biological capacity or biocapacity constitutes “The capacity of ecosystems to regenerate what people demand from those surfaces” [3]. The main variable that reflects the interaction between the two parts, analyzed in detail in this article, is the biocapacity reserve or deficit, which represents the difference between biocapacity and ecological footprint of a region or country. All these indicators are usually expressed in global hectares, but—to ensure comparability—the ratio between each indicator and population size, measured in global hectares per capita, was used in the analysis
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