Shrinking the ecological footprints of New Zealand’s local communities
By Ella Lawton
Otago Polytechnic Centre for Sustainable Practice is a partner in the Footprinting Urban Form and New Zealand Lifestyles project. The project will use the Natural Step’s framework for strategic sustainable development as an overarching framework to provide a principles-based definition of sustainability both for the project as a whole, and for the community plans and initiatives that are intended to arise out of it.
Recognising the pivotal use of the Natural Step framework, the project team have been invited to take part in the Natural Step’s “Real Change” programme, with a focus on researching and applying strategic sustainable development, through community collaboration and leadership.
On the 10th June I’ll be heading to Italy to present the project plan and initial findings at the “Footprint Forum 2010: Meet the Winners of the 21st Century” conference at Colle di Val d’Elsa. The conference includes a two day training session and a free public conference. After the conference I’ll be visiting a number of leading researchers and project teams throughout Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. If you have recommendations for other people to visit on my tour, I’d be very keen to hear so email them directly to me.
Ecological Footprint and the Natural Step framework for strategic sustainable development
The Ecological Footprint has proven itself as an effective education tool and an indicator of progress for supporting community wide sustainability projects. There are a number of fascinating case studies based on work in the United Kingdom, Norway, Italy, Canada, the USA, China and Australia.
Ecological Footprinting is a way of reporting certain aspects of sustainable development. It aggregates sustainability aspects that can be expressed in spatial units, leaving other sustainability related aspects out. The Natural Step framework on the other hand, is an overarching framework for Strategic planning towards sustainability. As such it needs a transparent display of all important aspects for sustainability, and logical guidelines for how to create action programmes that address those. In other words, the Natural Step framework is a way of planning, and Footprinting is a way of measuring progress that comes from implementing the plan.
For those who want to read more about this, there are two excellent papers that have been co-authored by Karl-Henrik Robèrt and co-creator of the Ecological Footprint, Mathias Wackernagel (Holmberg, Lundqvist, Robèrt, & Wackernagel, 1999; Robèrt, et al., 2002)
The Ecological Footprint is an ideal way to measure the sustainability of a community. It is basically a resource accounting tool that measures how much biologically productive land and sea is used by a given population or activity, and compares this to how much land and sea is available. Productive land and sea areas support human demands for food, fibre, timber, energy, and space for infrastructure. These areas also absorb waste. The Ecological Footprint measures the sum of these areas, wherever they physically occur on the planet. These measurements are then communicated in spatial units known as ‘global hectares’ providing a measure that can be benchmarked and compared.
Measuring the footprint of a community is a useful ‘snapshot’ of their current state, but in the absence of strategic action based upon the results, change will almost undoubtedly be limited. Framing the Ecological Footprint within the broader Natural Step framework allows project managers not only to ensure that the community response is strategic, but that there is a clear understanding about what is required to move towards a sustainable future.
For further information about this project contact Ella Lawton at ella.lawton@op.ac.nz.