Redefining Progress - The Nature Of Economics

Purpose of website:

Global energy use is by most accounts the most damaging activity on the planet. Its many adverse impacts degrade air, water, and soil quality, human and ecological health. Carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion are the major cause of rapid human-induced climate change, which poses serious threats the biosphere and hence to global society. read more...

This web-course is designed to teach university students and resource management professionals how to calculate the ecological footprint of energy use and the carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion, which constitute the single largest portion of human's planetary footprint. The energy footprint attempts to quantify energy's main demands on biological productivity, which is the foundation of earth's live support systems. Carbon emissions are increasingly tracked by governments and other institutions to monitor both the problem and efforts to control emissions.

This web-course can be used for university classes on the subject, or it can be used independently by resource professionals to master the subject. No additional texts should be required. This site also provides links to some of the many excellent materials on these and related subjects that are now available on the Internet, posted by highly credible organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change and governmental organizations that track energy use. As such, the course provides a foundation, or port of energy, to the much larger subject of energy, society, and the environment.

Getting started

For those unfamiliar with footprinting, start by getting some more background on ecological footprints and their uses. Next proceed to an overview of the energy footprint. From there you will be led through the various steps required to calculate the energy footprints of different energy sources. Alternatively, use the links menu to navigate this site.

Assessing Energy's
Footprint and Carbon Emissions:
A Free University Web-Course Module

Academic Content by: Karina Garbesi
Web Design by: Kinga Dow Productions, Inc.
Sponsored by: Redefining Progress
Work Supported by: The San Francisco Foundation

Ecological Footprints:

Originally developed by William Rees and Matthais Wackernagel in 1994, over the past decade the ecological footprint has become a widely used indicator of sustainability. The ecological footprint quantifies the area of biologically productive land and water used to supply human resource needs (crops, fish, meat, forest products, energy and built-up lands) and, to some extent, to absorb its wastes. In the simplest terms, a population's activities are clearly unsustainable if the size of the footprint exceeds the available area of ecologically productive land and water. Importantly, ecological footprint analyses indicate which activities generate the greatest demands on Earth's biocapacity. As shown below, this web-site focuses on the largest single contributor to the global ecological footprint, energy. read more...

Though the calculated size of society's energy footprint varies by assessment method, the different methods agree that energy constitutes the largest component of society's ecological footprint. The pie charts below show the breakdown of activities contributing to human's global ecological footprint according to the Footprint of Nations 2005 report and the Living Planet Report 2004 independently produced by Redefining Progress and the Global Footprint Network, respectively. These two reports were selected because they constitute the most recent reports based on the same year's data (2001). We note however that more recent Living Planet Reports are now available. While there are obvious differences in the footprint assessment, the causes of which are discussed in the section on Ecological Footprint Modeling, in both assessments energy is the single largest component of the footprint.

Fig.1. Sources of the 2001 global ecological footprint according to Footprint of Nations 2005.	Fig.2. Sources of the 2001 global ecological footprint according to the Living Planet Report 2005.

Sources

Rees, W.E., and Wackernagel, M.: 1994, "Ecological footprints and appropriated carrying capacity: measuring the natural capital requirements of the human economy," In A. Jansson et al., Investing in Natural Capital: The Ecological Economics Approach to Sustainability, Washington, D.C., Island Press.