Ecological Footprint Inequality: A Methodological Review and Some Results

Abstract

Scarcities of environmental services are no longer merely a remote hypothesis. Consequently, analysis of their inequalities between nations becomes of paramount importance for the achievement of sustainability in terms either of international policy, or of Universalist ethical principles of equity. This paper aims, on the one hand, at revising methodological aspects of the inequality measurement of certain environmental data and, on the other, at extending the scarce empirical evidence relating to the international distribution of Ecological Footprint (EF), by using a longer EF time series. Most of the techniques currently important in the literature are revised and then tested on EF data with interesting results. We look in depth at Lorenz dominance analyses and consider the underlying properties of different inequality indices. Those indices which fit best with environmental inequality measurements are CV 2 and GE(2) because of their neutrality property, however a trade-off may occur when subgroup decompositions are performed. A weighting factor decomposition method is proposed in order to isolate weighting factor changes in inequality growth rates. Finally, the only non-ambiguous way of decomposing inequality by source is the natural decomposition of CV 2 , which additionally allows the interpretation of marginal term contributions. Empirically, this paper contributes to the environmental inequality measurement of EF: this inequality has been quite stable and its change over time is due to per capita vector changes rather than population changes. Almost the entirety of the EF inequality is explainable by differences in the means between the countries of the World Bank group. This finding suggests that international environmental agreements should be attempted on a regional basis in an attempt to achieve greater consensus between the parties involved. Additionally, source decomposition warns of the dangers of confining CO 2 emissions reduction to crop-based energies because of the implications for basic needs satisfaction.

The Building Blocks of International Ecological Footprint Inequality: A Regression-Based Decomposition

“…The RBID is based on considering the product of estimated coefficients and its variable as a composite variable, where the coefficients () play the role of weighting the importance of the component k in contributing to whole EF. As a result, a consistent 6 White (2007) and Teixido-Figueras and Duro (2012) decompose the International Ecological Footprint Inequality according to the contribution of EF components. The main results indicate that the most important contribution to EF inequality became the carbon footprint because of its rising share in total EF rather than because of its inequality, which actually decreased.…”

Reducing global environmental inequality: Determining regional quotas for environmental burdens through systems optimisation

“…Previous efforts on environmental inequality focused on analysing the distribution of carbon emissions (Duro and Padilla, 2006;Pan et al, 2014;Teng et al, 2011), on correlating emissions with income inequality (Padilla and Serrano, 2006) and on providing prospects on carbon-emissions inequality (Heil and Wodon, 2000). In contrast, fewer studies assessed inequality in other environmental indicators, such as air pollutants and their toxicity (Boyce et al, 2016), natural resources and materials (Hedenus and Azar, 2005;Teixidó-Figueras et al, 2016), and the ecological footprint of different burdens (Duro & Teixidó-Figueras, 2013;Teixidó-Figueras & Duro, 2015;Teixido-Figueras & Duro, 2012). Going far beyond previous research, this work provides a full analysis of current inequality levels across a wide range of environmental burdens (25 in total) related to resource consumption and emissions to the environment.…”