Understand everything about calculating the ecological footprint

The notion of ecological footprint was developed in the 1990s by two researchers, Swiss and Canadian. More global than the carbon footprint, it assesses the surface area necessary to produce what we consume (food, housing, transport, etc.) and to absorb our emissions, particularly CO2 emissions.

The ecological footprint is measured in global hectares (hag), a unit which allows us to compare all the productive surfaces of the Earth (agricultural land, forests, oceans, built-up land, etc.) then reduced to the number of planets necessary to support our lifestyles. In a given country, the determining criterion is therefore not the size of the population, but its modes of production and consumption.

Qatar, for example, has a very high footprint due to its energy consumption and oil and gas extraction infrastructure. Like France, it is one of the so-called “ecological debtor” countries. This means that they consume more resources than their territory produces.

Conversely, countries like India or Cameroon are “ecological creditors”: the biological capacity of their country is greater than their consumption.

Energy sobriety, the use of renewable energies and low-meat diets are levers for staying within planetary limits.