Ecological footprints

PINOY KASI

Ecological footprints
By Michael Tan

Inquirer

Last updated 01:14am (Mla time) 11/08/2006

Published on Page A13 of the November 8, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

HOW MANY hectares of natural resources, on land and sea, are needed to support you?
It’s an intriguing question, and a simple way of restating what an “ecological footprint” is. Just to give you a rough idea, each person on earth today needs about 2.0 hectares of land and sea to support his or her lifestyle. The problem is that the planet’s biocapacity, the total available resources, comes up to only about 1.8 hectares per person, which means we are incurring an ecological deficit.
Those figures are global averages, representing wide differences among nations and, within countries, among economic classes. I’ll get around to giving some of the current estimates, including those for the Philippines, but let’s first examine this ecological footprint in greater detail.
Lifestyles
The footprint (I’ll use this term from here on to save on space) is calculated by looking at different aspects of our lifestyles: food, housing, mobility, energy. It looks mainly at consumption, but also accounts for the resources needed to take care of the wastes we generate. Each country has a calculated bioproductive resource base, meaning land and sea resources that can be used.
The footprint becomes an educational tool for individuals and households by making you conscious about how your choices determine its size. For starters, you might want to try www.myfootprint.org, which has a simple questionnaire to help you determine what your footprint is.
Taking the footprint quiz got me alternating between euphoria and depression. One moment, I was quite proud that my largely vegetarian diet was minimal in terms of ecological impact. On average, you need about 0.78 hectare to produce a ton of crop-based food (cereals, grains, vegetables); on the other hand, you would need 2.1 hectares to produce a ton of animal-based food.
But that pride gave way to shame answering the questions on mobility. I do drive a lot, often alone, and chalk up several thousand miles of air travel each year.
In terms of housing, I can claim some conservation measures, from using solar heating to recycling and composting, but my footprint grew because I’m still largely reliant on traditional sources of energy. Not that I haven’t tried, but even my solar heating supplier couldn’t come up with a system to support even emergency energy needs in the house.
National footprints
I nearly choked when I finally got my footprint calculation, which I’ll share with you shortly but let’s look first at national footprints. The Global Footprint Network’s latest calculations list the following five countries as having the largest footprints, expressed in hectares per person: the United Arab Emirates (10.5), the United States (9.7), Canada (7.5), Kuwait (7.3) and Australia (7). In contrast, the five smallest footprints are those of Pakistan and Zambia, each with 0.6, Bangladesh and Cambodia each with 0.5, and Somalia with 0.2.
And the Philippines? We needed about one hectare per person. For my urbanite readers, one hectare is 10,000 square meters.
The footprint concept should give us a new lens for looking at the environment. All that land we see in rural areas isn’t really “empty” -- it is needed for food production, for shelter, for erosion control, for landfills. Most importantly, it is land we share with all kinds of animal and plant life that keep a precarious ecological balance. Talk with fisherfolk and they’ll tell you about their frustration with going out to the sea an entire night, casting nets over wide areas of ocean and yet hauling in tiny fish catches.
The footprint figures also alert us to the issue of equity. Note that each American needs 10 times more biological resources than a Filipino would. Here’s another catch: even within countries, the differences can be quite wide. I try very hard to be eco-friendly with my lifestyle and yet the ecological footprint quiz I took, however rough, estimated that I needed 14 hectares. Shame, shame!
I figured that if I need 14 hectares, then people in developed countries would need easily more than 50 hectares each. It’s mind-boggling, especially when you think of the lower end of the spectrum -- the people living on 0.2 hectare of resources.
Responsibility
It all boils down to a question of responsibility. There are many publications now, and Internet sites, giving suggestions for individual decisions that will make a difference: using bikes rather than cars, drying clothes out under the sun rather than the electric dryer, even, gulp, foregoing that liquid plasma TV.
Some of the Internet resources talk more about collective action, for example, as a guide for public policies. For example, one estimate places London’s footprint at 21 million hectares, yet the city itself has only 170,000 hectares of land.
Cities, not surprisingly, tend to rack up a larger ecological deficit and public policies need to complement individual decisions. You can’t get people to bike more if you don’t have more bike lanes.
The bottom line then is that cities thrive at the expense of the countryside and, globally, rich countries in a sense live off poor countries. Just look at the recent controversy over the Philippine-Japan free trade agreement, and the possibility that we might end up being a dump for Japan’s wastes.
The footprint can become a powerful educational tool, raising public awareness about the choices we need to make for more sustainable development. The footprint calculations, which date back to the 1990s, have already shown some decreases in footprints for countries that are more ecologically conscious, with the Western European countries leading the way.
The footprint statistics also show us that development need not involve large consumption like those of countries in North America and the Middle East. The Netherlands, for example, has a footprint of only 4.4 hectares per person, half that of the United States and the United Arab Emirates.
The Philippines shouldn’t be complacent about our small footprint. Even at 1.0 hectare per person, we’re still running a deficit of 0.4 hectare per person because of our limited natural resources and large population.
We will need to figure out how we can develop in dollar and peso terms without continuing to rack up an ecological deficit. In a sense, we’ve already gone into debt with nature, and the interest costs will build up. We see these “green” costs with landslides and other ecological disasters. Eventually, these could easily wipe out the small gains we’re making in the economy. Worse, we may end up surviving only at the cost of using up resources that were meant for the future. As one African proverb goes, the environment was not given to us by our parents; rather it is lent to us by our children.