96
6 Benchmarking the Carbon, Water and Land Footprints …
• Environmental unsustainability: an unsafe state in which the footprint of human
activities placed on the environment exceeds boundary of capacity.
6.2.2 Selecting Key Environmental Footprints
for Cross-National Analysis
In view of the ever-expanding list of environmental footprints, we have to restrict our
analysis to some key footprints that have proved useful in measuring human pressure
on the environment. We have therefore made a selection of footprints with a focus on
their scientific robustness, documentation, and applicability. Our selection contains
the carbon footprint, the water footprint (consisting of the green and blue water
footprints) and the land footprint for the following reasons: (1) the three footprints
are sufficiently mature to support policy makers and the public in accounting for the
appropriation of natural capital in terms of carbon emissions, water use and land use
(Fang et al. 2014), in particular for cross-national analysis that will be undertaken
in the remainder of this chapter; (2) in the inventory stage, no obvious overlap has
been observed among the three footprints, which allows one to avoid counting the
same resources or emissions in duplicate; (3) of the aggregated processes, water
use and land use are identified as the only two which are likely to show threshold
behaviors suited for measurement on a nation-specific basis (Cole et al. 2014); and
(4) the reason not to include gray water is that its data presently available are related
to nitrogen loads, which mostly contribute to groundwater pollution and therefore
ought to be compared with the waste assimilative capacity of groundwater (Schyns
and Hoekstra 2014), for which the data at the national level are not easily obtainable.
6.2.3 Data Sources
We conduct an analysis of the latest datasets available. All data relate to nationspecific carbon, water, and land footprints. In the absence of better datasets for
the same year, we tentatively assemble these data with the assumption that they are
sufficiently comparable. Given data availability, 28 countries have been chosen in this
study for empirical analysis, namely, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada,
China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan,
Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain,
Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK, and the USA. Data sources are juxtaposed in
Table 6.1. Note that, for convenience, we name either the world-average values or
the global values as global values.
6 Benchmarking the Carbon, Water and Land Footprints …
• Environmental unsustainability: an unsafe state in which the footprint of human
activities placed on the environment exceeds boundary of capacity.
6.2.2 Selecting Key Environmental Footprints
for Cross-National Analysis
In view of the ever-expanding list of environmental footprints, we have to restrict our
analysis to some key footprints that have proved useful in measuring human pressure
on the environment. We have therefore made a selection of footprints with a focus on
their scientific robustness, documentation, and applicability. Our selection contains
the carbon footprint, the water footprint (consisting of the green and blue water
footprints) and the land footprint for the following reasons: (1) the three footprints
are sufficiently mature to support policy makers and the public in accounting for the
appropriation of natural capital in terms of carbon emissions, water use and land use
(Fang et al. 2014), in particular for cross-national analysis that will be undertaken
in the remainder of this chapter; (2) in the inventory stage, no obvious overlap has
been observed among the three footprints, which allows one to avoid counting the
same resources or emissions in duplicate; (3) of the aggregated processes, water
use and land use are identified as the only two which are likely to show threshold
behaviors suited for measurement on a nation-specific basis (Cole et al. 2014); and
(4) the reason not to include gray water is that its data presently available are related
to nitrogen loads, which mostly contribute to groundwater pollution and therefore
ought to be compared with the waste assimilative capacity of groundwater (Schyns
and Hoekstra 2014), for which the data at the national level are not easily obtainable.
6.2.3 Data Sources
We conduct an analysis of the latest datasets available. All data relate to nationspecific carbon, water, and land footprints. In the absence of better datasets for
the same year, we tentatively assemble these data with the assumption that they are
sufficiently comparable. Given data availability, 28 countries have been chosen in this
study for empirical analysis, namely, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada,
China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan,
Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain,
Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK, and the USA. Data sources are juxtaposed in
Table 6.1. Note that, for convenience, we name either the world-average values or
the global values as global values.