Ecological Footprint Accounting: Just like the Family Budget
The Ecological Footprint can be understood as simply as a family budget, according to a new video (in Spanish) released by the Community of Andean Nations (CAN).
The CAN and its member nations – Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia and Peru – began working with Global Footprint Network in early 2009 on an initiative to maintain one of the CAN region’s richest and most important assets: its natural resource base. The initiative seeks to demonstrate the interdependence between a country’s natural wealth, its economic health and, ultimately, the well-being of its people.
National Geographic Looks at Impact of Growing Human Footprint
No matter how we define sustainability, National Geographic says in a special issue out this month, it must reflect this simple truth: “We are a species of unlimited appetites living on a planet with limited resources.”
EarthPulse: State of the Earth 2010, which opens with a full page of Global Footprint Network data, offers the clearest endorsement yet by a mainstream publication of the idea of sustainability as living within the means of one planet. The issue reflects a growing understanding that the crisis of climate change is a symptom of a larger problem: humanity’s growing metabolism of resources, and the strain that is putting on our natural systems.