Ecological Debt: Exploring the Factors that Affect National Footprints

Approaches to Define Environmental Debt in the Framework of Sustainable Development

“…The experts from GFN indicated that the costs of the ecological overspending are becoming more evident day by day, in the form of deforestation, drought, water scarcity, erosion, biodiversity loss, and the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However, the authors in the paper (Cranston et al 2010) wrote that ecological footprint analysis represents only the resource consumption and wastes arising from the activities of a specific population. If one country (China) were to export a product to another country (USA), then the resources and wastes associated with that product will be attributed to the USA environmental footprint and not to the Chinese one.…”

“…If one country (China) were to export a product to another country (USA), then the resources and wastes associated with that product will be attributed to the USA environmental footprint and not to the Chinese one. This can be demonstrated via a simple equation for the "consumption footprint" (Cranston et al 2010;Loh 2002;Loh and Goldfinger 2006;Cranston et al 2010).…”

“…Ecological footprint calculations involve the several steps. The land area appropriated per capita is broken down into different categories of ecological space: biodiversity land; bio productive (including arable, forestry, and pasture) land; bioproductive sea; built or degraded land; energy land (Cranston et al 2010). Furthermore, the experts from GFN created special online platform (What 2018) where everyone could calculate the own footprint.…”