Present and future ecological footprint of Slovenia—The influence of energy demand scenarios

The international community – including Slovenia, which recently became a EU member state – has expressed its commitment to sustainable development. The methods necessary to measure the degrees of success in achieving this final goal must be developed in parallel. Recently, the ecological footprint method has gained more prominence. In this paper, for the first time, the Slovenian ecological footprint is presented. It was found that current ecological footprint of Slovenia (3.85 gha/capita) exceeds the available biological productive areas (2.55 gha/capita) and significantly exceeds the biological productive areas of the planet (1.9 gha/capita). Therefore, Slovenia must be classified as a country with non-sustainable development, both on locally and globally scale. Because of the large influence of the energy supply on the ecological footprint, several national strategies and international directives promoting energy conservation and renewable energy sources were accepted. These documents were taken into consideration when predicting the future ecological footprint of Slovenia for the year 2020.