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El bienestar de la población asentada en un territorio (un país, una ciudad, un pueblo) está íntimamente ligado a la capacidad de oferta de bienes y servicios ambientales. Conocer los requerimientos de la población y la capacidad del espacio disponible para la satisfacción de sus necesidades, es fundamental para garantizar la sustentabilidad ambiental. La Economía Ecológica nos permite, a través del cálculo de la Huella Ecológica HE y la Biocapacidad BC estimar el déficit ambiental de un territorio determinado. Aunque a nivel global la utilidad práctica de estos indicadores para la toma de decisiones es limitada, en los ámbitos nacional, regional o local son instrumentos útiles para la toma de decisiones en la planificación y la gestión ambiental. Aportan elementos para la planificación del uso del suelo, en aspectos relacionados con la provisión de alimentos, energía, agua, disposición de residuos de una ciudad determinada, como es el caso de Manizales. En este texto, se presenta, en la primera parte, el cálculo de la Huella Ecológica de la ciudad de Manizales y la Biocapacidad BC del departamento de Caldas. En segundo lugar, se estima el déficit o superávit ambiental. Y por último, a manera de conclusiones, se proponen lineamientos de política para mejorar la gestión del territorio del departamento de Caldas y la calidad de vida de la población de Manizales para garantizar la sustentabilidad ambiental en la región. The well-being of people located in a territory (a country, a city, a town) is intimately bound to the capacity of goods and environmental services available. Knowing the population's requirements and the capacity of the available space for the satisfaction of their necessities is fundamental to guarantee environmental sustainability. Ecological Economy allows us, by calculating the Ecological Footprint EF and Biocapacity BC, to estimate the environmental deficit of the territory. Although at a global level the practical utility of these indicators for decision-making is limited, in the national, regional or local environments, they are useful instruments for decision-making in environmental planning and management; since they offer elements for the planning of land use, in aspects related to the provision of food, energy, water, housing and disposition of wastes of a city, like Manizales. This text presents in the first part, the calculation of Manizales' Ecological Footprint and Caldas' Biocapacity BC. In second place, the city's environmental deficit is considered. And finally, policies to improve the territorial management of Caldas and the well-being of Manizales' population are proposed in order to guarantee the environmental sustainability in the region.

Abstract. This paper presents an overview of global climate management practices in agriculture in response to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and the Kyoto Protocol. Agriculture is a significant net contributor to climate change through the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) -- nitrous oxide (N2O), methane (CH4), and carbon dioxide (CO2). At the same time, agriculture is affected by the global rise in temperature, change in precipitation patterns and extreme weather events. To remain sustainable, agriculture must limit its impact on the global climate. The Kyoto Protocol was placed into effect February 2005. Clean development mechanism (CDM) is a flexible mechanism to reduce emission. --In agriculture, it is recognized that more work is needed to propose simplified guidelines and methodologies for small scale CDM projects. Methane recovery projects and avoidance of methane production are treated separately. Recent research summarizes global measures to agriculture including improvement of feed digestibility and rice paddy management to decrease methane emission, utility of soil as carbon sink, control of N--fertilizer application, land management, and pest and disease control. As bio--ethanol production as an alternative to the use of fossil fuel creates a demand on agricultural land, the Brazilian, American and Chinese approaches are compared. Management practices in agriculture include ecological management, hierarchical analysis, emissions balance, and climatic data management. Beyond 2012, deeper reductions in global emissions will be required. A reconstruction of the problem in the framework of biocapacity and ecological footprint can stimulate problem solving.

Contributors. Foreword. Series Preface. Preface. List of Abbreviations. Part I: Renewables as a Resource and Sustainability Performance Indicators. 1 The Contribution of Renewables to Society (Goran Berndes). 2 The Potential of Renewables as a Feedstock for Chemistry and Energy (Wilfried G. J. H. M. van Sark, Martin K. Patel, Andre P. C. Faaij and Monique M. Hoogwijk). 3 Sustainability Performance Indicators (Alexei Lapkin). Part II: Relevant Assessment Tools. 4 Life Cycle Inventory Analysis Applied to Renewable Resources (Niels Jungbluth and Rolf Frischknecht). 5 Net Energy Balancing and Fuel-Cycle Analysis (Hosein Shapouri, Michael Wang and James A. Duffield). 6 Life Cycle Assessment as an Environmental Sustainability Tool (Adisa Azapagic). 7 Exergy (Jo Dewulf and Herman Van Langenhove). 8 Material Flow Analysis and the Use of Renewables from a Systems Perspective (Stefan Bringezu). 9 Ecological Footprints and Biocapacity: Essential Elements in Sustainability Assessment (William E. Rees). 10 The Sustainable Process Index (SPI) (Michael Narodoslawsky and Anneliese Niederl). Part III:Case Studies. 11 Assessment of Sustainable Land Use in Producing Biomass (Helmut Haberl and Karl-Heinz Erb). 12 Assessment of the Forest Products Industries (Klaus Richter, Frank Werner and Hans-Jorg Althaus). 13 Assessment of the Energy Production Industry: Modern Options for Producing Secondary Energy Carriers from Biomass (Andre Faaij). 14 Assessment of Biofuels (James A. Duffield, Hosein Shapouri and Michael Wang). 15 Assessment of Organic Waste Treatment (Jan-Olov Sundqvist). 16 Oleochemical and Petrochemical Surfactants: An Overall Assessment (Erwan Saouter, Gert Van Hoof, Mark Stalmans and Alan Brunskill). 17 Assessment of Bio-Based Packaging Materials (Andreas Detzel, Martina Kruger and Axel Ostermayer). 18 Assessment of Biotechnology-Based Chemicals (Peter Saling and Andreas Kicherer). 19 Assessment of Bio-Based Pharmaceuticals: The Cephalexin Case (Alle Bruggink and Peter Nossin). Part IV:Conclusions. 20 Conclusions (Jo Dewulf and Herman Van Langenhove). Index.

Adaptive management as applied to tourism policy treats management policies as experiments that probe the responses of the system as human behavior changes. We present a conceptual systems model that incorporates the gap between observed and desired levels of the ecological footprint with respect to biocapacity. Addressing this gap (or 'overshoot') can inform strategies to increase or decrease visitation or its associated consumption in the coming years. The feedback mechanism in this conceptual model incorporates a gap between observed and desired ecological footprint levels of tourists and residents. The work is based on longer-term and ongoing study of tourism impacts and ecological footprint assessments from the SPIN-Eco Project. We present historical tourism and environmental data from the province of Siena, Italy and discuss the use of discrete, static environmental indicators as part of an iterative feedback process to manage tourism within biophysical limits. We discuss a necessary shift of emphasis from certain and static numbers to a process-based management model that can reflect slow changes to biophysical resources. As underscored by ecological footprint analysis, the energy and material use associated with tourism and local activity can erode natural capital foundations if that use exceeds the area's biological capacity to support it. The dynamic, and iterative process of using such indicators as management feedback allows us to view sustainability more accurately as a transition and journey, rather than a static destination to which management must arrive.

This study investigates the regional pattern of ecological capital in Indonesia through the principles of political economy. In this discourse, the gap between biocapacity and ecological footprint at the regional level (provinces) indicates the difficulties of environmental sustainability. Unevenness in ecological capital patterns occurs in Indonesian provinces as the gap between biocapacity and ecological footprint is heterogeneous. To demonstrate the causes of this unevenness, the regional pattern of ecological capital is scrutinised using the principle of hegemony, the principle of Circular and Cumulative Causation (CCC) and principle of contradiction.

Sustainability requires living within the regenerative capacity of the biosphere. In an attempt to measure the extent to which humanity satisfies this requirement, we use existing data to translate human demand on the environment into the area required for the production of food and other goods, together with the absorption of wastes. Our accounts indicate that human demand may well have exceeded the biosphere's regenerative capacity since the 1980s. According to this preliminary and exploratory assessment, humanity's load corresponded to 70% of the capacity of the global biosphere in 1961, and grew to 120% in 1999.

En el municipio de Puerto Wilches el monocultivo de palma africana actualmente es un eje trasversal de la economía, modificando la diversidad de los ecosistemas y cultivos tradicionales de la zona. Por lo cual, el objetivo de esta investigación es medir y evaluar los impactos de los cultivos de palma africana en el lapso de 1987 a 2010 adaptando la metodología desarrollada por Mathis Wackernagel y William Rees y algunos aportes de los desarrollos realizados por Juan Luis Doménech, aunando a estos tecnología satelital e indicadores de biocapacidad y déficit ecológico para conocer los requerimientos de espacios y recursos naturales necesarios para la producción de los derivados de la palma. El análisis de la época arrojó para el año 1987 un indicador de huella ecológica con un valor de 1.255 ha/pc, biocapacidad del cultivo 0.470 ha/pc, déficit ecológico correspondiente a -0.785 ha/pc; se estima un valor del 16 % en cuanto a la producción y uso de recursos. Con relación a los indicadores de sostenibilidad, en 2010 se obtuvieron valores de huella ecológica de 5.492 ha/pc, biocapacidad 1.454 ha/pc y déficit ecológico de -4.038 ha/pc, cifras que evidencian los efectos originados por la implementación del monocultivo en la zona, que para la fecha aumento en un 63 % la producción y uso de recursos naturales. Por lo anterior, es necesario y urgente elaborar e implementar políticas de planificación territorial así como alternativas de producción económica para mejorar la calidad ambiental y social del municipio, deteniendo la acelerada antropización de la región.

The search for frameworks and indicators of sustainable development has taken a prominent place in this journal. However, some specific aspects have received little or no attention, notably the spatial dimension and the role of international trade in indicator development. Moreover, many sustainable development indicators comprise implicit valuations, weighting schemes and policy objectives, which are insufficiently recognised as such. This contribution tries to highlight these issues by means of a review of a recently proposed indicator for ecological‐economic analysis, namely the ecological footprint, that has been developed by Wackernagel and Rees. Its concept and calculation procedure are criticised on a number of points, and it is concluded that the Ecological Footprint is not the comprehensive and transparent planning tool as is often assumed. In explaining our position we will argue that spatial sustainability and regional sustainable development have not been precisely discussed so far, neither in the literature on trade and environment, nor in that on sustainable development. We will defend the view that trade can contribute positively and negatively to environmental unsustainability. Consequently, indicators and models are needed that allow for analysing interactions and trade-offs between such opposite effects. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

The Mediterranean Adequacy Index (MAI) trends from 1961to 2007, for 48 countries pooled in 4 clusters according to their geographical location (Mediterranean European (ME) countries, Other Mediterranean (OM) countries, Northern European (NE) countries, Eastern European (EE) countries), has been analysed. In almost all the countries the adherence to Mediterranean diet is decreasing from 1961up to 2007, even if with different trend linked to the geographical and cultural characteristic of the clusters (respectively -56% for European Mediterranean and -21 for non-European Mediterranean). The cluster more adherent to healthy Mediterranean diet principles is the OM one, where the incidence of colorectal cancer is shown to be around 50% lower respect to the incidence in ME countries, and around 60% lower respect to the incidence in EE and NE countries. A significant relationship was observed between colorectal cancer incidence and animal protein consumption. On the other hand, vegetable protein intake is suggested to be slightly protective against colorectal cancer incidence. The ecological footprint of food production is higher in ME and NE than in OM and EE countries, even if it is generally higher than the biocapacity. In the 70% of the analysed countries water consumption for food production exceeds the total water exploitable, with an increasing trend from 1961 to 2007. An increase of 1 unit of MAI can decrease the ecological, carbon and water footprint (around 20-25%), in dependence on the initial level of MAI. Due to the environmental and health beneficial effects, the Mediterranean diet can be promoted as a win-win diet system.

The 1992 United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development Summit underscored the need to conduct environmental sustainability evaluations. Such evaluations are important as they communicate the relationship between natural resources extraction and environmental regenerative capacity. We use the Ecological Footprint tool to evaluate the environmental sustainability of grazing landuse for Chirumanzu District of Zimbabwe. Empirical evidence presented here relates to livestock data obtained from the Veterinary Department and a sample household survey. Results revealed the presence of a large ecological reserve, depicting sustainable utilization of environmental resources. Further unravelling of the results, however, revealed under utilisation of the available biocapacity. Livestock-limited environmentally sustainable is the concept used to describe this scenario. Further interpretation of the large ecological reserve indicates insecure land tenure system, low livestock ownership and difficult economic hardships faced by resettled farmers. The paper recommends that the government adopts policies that encourage the development of a sustainable livestock sector.

Daya dukung lingkungan Kabupaten Gresik mengalami ketidakseimbangan dalam mewadahi setiap peningkatan kegiatan akibat pertumbuhan penduduk dan perubahan guna lahan yang semakin intensif. Ditandai dengan adanya ketidakseimbangan antara supply daya dukung lingkungan dan konsumsi sumber daya alam dimana perubahan penggunaan lahan di Kabupaten Gresik berakibat pada kerusakan ekologis seperti penurunan produktivitas lahan, krisis air, bencana banjir, dan pencemaran lingkungan. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui komponen daya dukung optimasi penggunaan lahan di Kabupaten Gresik. Metode yang digunakan adalah melalui pendekatan telapak ekologis dimana dapat diukur tingkat konsumsi sumber daya alam dan kemampuan lahan dalam menyediakan kebutuhan konsumsi tersebut dalam satuan lahan global hektar (gha). Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa biokapasitas Kabupaten Gresik mencapai 319.179,6 gha yang banyak tersebar di wilayah periurban. Prosentase biokapasitas tertinggi pada jenis lahan pertanian sebesar 53.92%. Meskipun demikian biokapasitas tersebut tidak sebanding dengan konsumsi telapak ekologis yang mencapai 1.63 juta gha terutama pada wilayah urban akibat tingginya populasi dan aktivitas kegiatan. Hal ini memperkuat kondisi ketidakseimbangan daya dukung lingkungan di Kabupaten Gresik yang sudah mengalami defisit ekologis sebesar 1.04 gha/kapita. Semua jenis lahan mengalami kondisi deficit dan hanya jenis lahan peternakan yang mengalami kondisi surplus sebesar 0.05 gha/kapita. Hasil pemetaan kondisi defisit ekologis menunjukkan bahwa optimasi penggunaan lahan perlu dilakukan dengan penerapan pembangunan kota kompak (Compact City) sehingga pembangunan mudah dikendalikan dan terjadi efisiensi penggunaan energi. Selain itu juga perlu penerapan sistem agropolitan melalui peningkatkan produktifitas lahan pada wilayah peri urban sebagai supply sumber daya utama di wilayah Kabupaten Gresik.

Cornejo-Ortega, J.L.; Chavez-Dagostino, R.M., and Massam, B.H., 2013. Sustainable tourism: whale watching footprint in the Bahia de Banderas, Mexico. The discussion about nonsustainable ecological systems is in vogue. The debate has led to the biophysical analysis of “human-nature” relationships. This analysis is an important way to determine human impacts on the Earth, based on the colonization of nature and social activities that consider matter and energy flows through appropriation, transformation, distribution, consumption, and excretion. Tourism has appropriated and characterized various types of ecosystems that represent the use of a finite set of spatially distributed resources. The observation of marine mammals, such as whales, in natural protected areas attracts many tourists each year, and this activity indirectly generates carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere. This carbon emission, which is accompanied by the increased scale of tourism, may hamper global conservation go...

Most research on the impact of income and other socioeconomic variables on the environment focuses on specific local environmental effects and not on the broader sustainability picture. We seek to fill the apparent gap in the literature, exploring whether and the extent to which income, economic openness, income inequality and the distribution of power influence sustainability. We employ ecological footprint data and from it derive a sustainability indicator, the ecological deficit. Using econometric analysis, we test the effects of our explanatory variables on the ecological deficit. While we find that economic openness appears to run counter to the goal of sustainability, the results for the other variables are more ambiguous and inconclusive.

The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) is an experiential welfare indicator based on an extended version of Fisher's distinction between income and capital. The primary aim of the GPI is to measure the difference between the net psychic income generated by economic activity (uncancelled benefit) and the natural capital services lost as a consequence of fuelling the economic process (uncancelled cost). Provided this is achieved with some degree of accuracy, the GPI is able to: (a) represent the value added to nature by the economic process; (b) determine whether growth of the economy, if it is presently occurring, is 'economic' or 'uneconomic'; and (c) signal when an economy has exceeded its optimal macroeconomic scale. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the GPI fails to strictly satisfy the central criterion embodied in the Hicksian concept of income. As such, the GPI is incapable of signalling when an economy has surpassed its maximum sustainable scale. But neither can so-called measures of Hicksian income (e.g., Net National Product (NNP)) since they, too, violate Hicks' central criterion. For this reason, indicators of sustainability are best left to measures of wealth/capital or, better still, comparisons between a nation's ecological footprint and biocapacity.

This article approaches sustainability study via geospatial analysis. By mapping two sustainability datasets (Ecological Footprint, 2003 and Environmental Sustainability Index, 2005) the article first assesses the current state of sustainable development world wide. The incompatible pictures presented by the two datasets imply their conflicting views on sustainability. To comprehend the conflicts, the article applies a series of thematic maps to further analyse them from the perspective of governance and GDP. It is found that the current condition of sustainable development is worrisome, especially from the view of bio-capacity. This condition is rooted in an unfortunate fact that both governance and GDP are negatively connected with our ecological footprint.

Securing food for growing populations while minimizing environmental externalities is becoming a key topic in the current sustainability debate. This is particularly true in the Mediterranean region, which is characterized by scarce natural resources and increasing climate-related impacts. This paper focuses on the pressure Mediterranean people place on the Earth ecosystems because of their food consumption and sourcing patterns and then explores ways in which such pressure can be reduced. To do so, it uses an Ecological-Footprint-Extended Multi-Regional Input-Output (EF-MRIO) approach applied to 15 Mediterranean countries. Results indicate that food consumption is a substantial driver of the region's ecological deficit, whereby demand for renewable resources and ecosystems services outpaces the capacity of its ecosystems to provide them. Portugal, Malta and Greece are found to have the highest per capita food Footprints (1.50, 1.25 and 1.22 global hectares (gha), respectively), while Slovenia, Egypt and Israel have the lowest (0.63, 0.64 and 0.79 gha, respectively). With the exception of France, all Mediterranean countries rely on the biocapacity of foreign countries to satisfy their residents' demand for food. By analyzing the effect of shifting to a calorie-adequate diet or changing dietary patterns, we finally point out that the region's Ecological Footprint – and therefore its ecological deficit – could be reduced by 8% to 10%.

It is estimated that the Earth’s biocapacity is unable to meet current demands, which begs the question: is a sustainable future possible for both humans and the environment? The UN projects a human population of approximately 11 billion by the end of the 21st century; requiring additional agricultural land, greater demands for natural resources, and technological advancements. We model human population over the next century, emphasizing feedbacks between natural and agricultural resource availability and human demography. We argue that an intensive agriculture approach to feeding the growing population is ill-conceived, without considering biodiversity and ecosystem services (e.g., nutrient cycling, pollination, water purification, pest control). The productivity of agricultural land and human population dynamics are dependent on the area of natural land—generally, tipping at 5 billion ha of natural land (approximately 40% of the Earth’s terrestrial area). Furthermore, our model shows that an imprudent proactive approach (i.e., focusing on agriculture and ignoring ecosystem services) limits the success of reactive measures (i.e., restoration) in the future, while the inability to react to changes and recover natural systems leads to human population decline.

The sustainable urban development research is a hot spot in science, economics, society etc. The Ecological Footprint (EF) method, which originally developed by Wackernagel and Rees in the mid-1990s, is a useful approach to detect the sustainability of the city. The Ecological Footprint (EF) is a measure of human demand on the bioproductive land area that is required to support the resource demands of a given population or specific activities. Comparing with Biocapacity (BC), which represents the bioproductive supply, EF provides a valuable tool to evaluate the carrying capacity of the earth and human appropriation of resources.

Introduction Geographical Boundaries of Food Production In recent decades, researchers have proposed several indicators to characterize the environmental impact of cities, countries, and populations. Though already in use in the early 1920s, the concept of a foodshed (Hedden, 1929; Peters et al. 2009b), introduced to designate a rural territory structured around supplying a city with agricultural products, provides a useful framework for analyzing the local production capacity of individual cities (Peters et al. 2009a). European and North American cities and their surrounding areas are characterized by concentric rings of farming activity devoted to the city's food supply, beginning with market gardening and dairy farming, followed by forestry, cereal production, and finally cattle farming, as Von Thunen described in 1826 (Billen et al. 2012). These scientists developed various methods for mapping and assessing potential foodsheds, meaning land areas that could theoretically feed urban centers. The resultant approaches evaluated how the location of food production in relation to its consumption affected the environment and the vulnerability of the overall food system (Peters et al. 2009b). In today's increasingly globalized world, the foodsheds of European and North American cities are coming under pressure, not least from conflicting land uses, such as suburbanization, leisure areas, and natural parks.Recent years have seen the development of a number of indicators to assess the global scarcity of land, water, and energy. For instance, Wackernagel & Rees (1996) developed the now classic concept of the ecological footprint (EF) based on a comprehensive estimate of the total productive area required to sustainably produce the resources consumed by a city, given the current state of agricultural technology, as expressed in "global hectare equivalent" units. Hoekstra & Chapagain (2004) introduced a method for calculating water footprints, representing all direct and indirect water use associated with urban consumption of commodities. In turn, the carbon footprint (Wiedmann & Minx, 2008) quantifies the overall emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) resulting from urban activities, while the nitrogen footprint (Leach et al. 2012) relates to the corresponding introduction of reactive nitrogen into the biosphere (Billen et al. 2012). In this study, we use the EF as a means of representing the geographical and ecological boundaries of food production.The Problem: Our Footprint Exceeds Available Biocapacity The capacity of the Earth--our ecological system--is under pressure. There is strong scientific evidence that we have surpassed the limits of climate change and biodiversity and changes in land use are no longer within the boundaries of what is safe for the planet (Rockstrom et al. 2009). A large share of the human EF is attributable to our food production and approximately one third of the human impact on climate and land use is related to our diet and the food chain (Dutilh & Kramer, 2000; Tukker et al. 2006; Garnett, 2011). These effects are larger than the impacts of leisure, housing, and labor (Vringer et al. 2010). Climate change mitigation policies tend to focus on the energy sector, paying the livestock sector surprisingly little attention, despite the fact that the latter accounts for 18% of worldwide GHG emissions and 80% of total anthropogenic land use (Stehfest et al. 2009). The problem is that the per capita EF of food, or "foodprint," in many developed countries, including the Netherlands, is higher than the world average and is higher than the foodprint technically available on a global scale. It is even higher than the total worldwide per capita available biological capacity for food, shelter, mobility, goods, and services combined (GFN, 2010).The Footprint is Dominated by Personal Food Choices The EF is largely determined by food consumption and personal dietary choices. …