True Cost Economics: Ecological Footprint

The paper proposes a measure of renewable bio-capacity. We argue that some dimensions of ecological sustainability should not be included in the Ecological Footprint. These include human activities that should be phased out to obtain sustainability, such as emissions of persistent compounds foreign to nature and qualitative aspects that represent secondary uses of ecological areas and do not, therefore, occupy a clearly identifiable additional ecological space. We also conclude that the Ecological Footprint, by aggregating in a consistent way a variety of human impacts, it can effectively identify the scale of the human economy by comparison with the size of the biosphere.