It's Time to Scrap the Ecological Footprint
Earth Overshoot Day is Fundamentally Meaningless
Each year, the Global Footprint Network announces Earth Overshoot Day, a day when “humanity has exhausted nature’s budget for the year” and is now in ecological debt. While appealing to commonsense ideas of humans’ impacts on the environment, Overshoot Day is based on the Ecological Footprint, a sustainability index that comes down to one thing: carbon dioxide. Beyond that, the Ecological Footprint doesn’t show ecological depletion for any other category it measures, including cropland, grazing land, forests, fishing grounds. That’s not because environmental impacts aren’t significant, but because the Ecological Footprint is a fundamentally flawed indicator. Here’s why we need to scrap it.
by Linus Blomqvist http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/issues/environment/its-time-to-scrap-the-ecological-footprint
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