Algerian coastal and marine ecological footprint assessment: feasibility and constraints
Auteur
Akrour, Sonia
This thesis assesses the sustainability of Algeria's coastal cities based on several socioeconomic activities, including fishing, agriculture and animal husbandry, forestry, urbanization, water consumption, and urban waste management, in coastal wilayas, i.e., Algiers and Tipaza, which are the main urban centers of anthropic activity.
Following a bottom-up approach of the ecological footprint, the model uses locally collected data and displays overshoot points for three components: material, energy, and built area.
The main findings reveal that Algiers and Tipaza wilayas are facing an ecological deficit, which is more significant in the wilaya of Algiers (62 million gha). This result was anticipated for the wilaya of Algiers, selected precisely to demonstrate the effects of socio-economic activity intensity. Nevertheless, the wilaya of Tipaza, which was selected mainly for its significant natural assets, has a smaller deficit overall but more pronounced for the fishing activity. Nevertheless, these data should be considered with caution, as this work was performed in a data-scarce context and required additional analysis, such as the life cycle analysis of each product consumed within the wilayas, thus, providing relevant knowledge to the limited literature on EF and life cycle assessment in Algeria. Furthermore, the contribution of this study lies in the information and diagnosis that the multilevel model supplies to decisionmakers about the challenges of achieving sustainability in a given activity sector.
Most importantly, this study could also serve as the first document for the popularization of the ecological footprint concept and calculation in Algeria, as well as a baseline for public outreach programs on resource use and eco-responsibility.