6.5 Conclusions
111
to the national scale and to benchmark against environmental footprints, with the
intention of bridging the disciplinary gap and, more importantly, of making use
of the synergies for ESA. By means of the F–B ESA framework, we are able to
uncover the sustainability gaps of carbon emissions, water use, and land use for
28 countries and the whole world. The well accordance with previous studies at the
global scale allows our study to be as a whole reliable and reproducible. By examining
the correlation between the resulting ESRs and selected explanatory variables, we
also discuss certain possible driving factors for unsustainable resource use patterns.
Furthermore, seeking to meet the rising policy demand for an overall picture of the
environmental sustainability of nations, the ESRI is launched for snapshotting and
ranking nations’ overall performance on the three environmental issues investigated.
The main value added of the chapter is to provide concrete evidence of how the
F–B ESA framework makes it possible to allocate global responsibility for environmental sustainability to individual countries where environmental policy initiatives
massively take place. It is not difficult to expect application extensions to sub-national
scales, such as regions, cities, and organizations, on which environmental issues are
dealt with even more often. A key difficulty concerns the disparate scaling effects
of the systemic and aggregated processes. For carbon emissions, for instance, the
unambiguous global nature enables the carbon boundary to be one of the few planetary boundaries that can be downscaled to the national level through top-down
approaches that seem to be a normative or political issue more than a scientific issue.
Conversely, water and land boundaries are in many cases a sub-national problem,
for which reliable local assessments could only be fulfilled by the access to highresolution data for local-scale resource availability. The real challenges are therefore
a mix of downscaling and upscaling, as well as a convergence of scientific and
political considerations.
Admittedly, we realize that the analysis presented is limited in the capacity to
capture the full complexity of sustainability, as proved by the crude data gathering,
the exclusion of many environmental issues by design, and the orientation towards
macro- or meso-level that hampers the allocation of overall responsibility to a single
process or product at the micro-level (Hoekstra 2015). A further critical point is
that, although benchmarking the green and blue water footprints against the blue
water availability creates a solution to the overly optimistic estimate of planetary
water boundary under current PBF (Jaramillo and Destouni 2015; Molden 2009),
this comparison is flawed in the sense that the scopes of the water footprint and
boundary metrics are not identical. To improve the comparability of studies that
define environmental sustainability from authors’ point of view, further work needs
to specify the precise realms of application of the production-based and consumptionbased ESRs. But regardless of the choice, it is preferable to define the footprint and
boundary metrics along the same principle, so that both numerator and denominator
are either production-based or consumption-based. In addition, the investigation
into the driving forces behind sustainability gaps is far from an exhaustive factorial analysis, even though it manages to provide an interesting basis for discussion
on the importance and complexity of economic, natural, and demographic factors
for understanding national performance on environmental sustainability. Besides, the
111
to the national scale and to benchmark against environmental footprints, with the
intention of bridging the disciplinary gap and, more importantly, of making use
of the synergies for ESA. By means of the F–B ESA framework, we are able to
uncover the sustainability gaps of carbon emissions, water use, and land use for
28 countries and the whole world. The well accordance with previous studies at the
global scale allows our study to be as a whole reliable and reproducible. By examining
the correlation between the resulting ESRs and selected explanatory variables, we
also discuss certain possible driving factors for unsustainable resource use patterns.
Furthermore, seeking to meet the rising policy demand for an overall picture of the
environmental sustainability of nations, the ESRI is launched for snapshotting and
ranking nations’ overall performance on the three environmental issues investigated.
The main value added of the chapter is to provide concrete evidence of how the
F–B ESA framework makes it possible to allocate global responsibility for environmental sustainability to individual countries where environmental policy initiatives
massively take place. It is not difficult to expect application extensions to sub-national
scales, such as regions, cities, and organizations, on which environmental issues are
dealt with even more often. A key difficulty concerns the disparate scaling effects
of the systemic and aggregated processes. For carbon emissions, for instance, the
unambiguous global nature enables the carbon boundary to be one of the few planetary boundaries that can be downscaled to the national level through top-down
approaches that seem to be a normative or political issue more than a scientific issue.
Conversely, water and land boundaries are in many cases a sub-national problem,
for which reliable local assessments could only be fulfilled by the access to highresolution data for local-scale resource availability. The real challenges are therefore
a mix of downscaling and upscaling, as well as a convergence of scientific and
political considerations.
Admittedly, we realize that the analysis presented is limited in the capacity to
capture the full complexity of sustainability, as proved by the crude data gathering,
the exclusion of many environmental issues by design, and the orientation towards
macro- or meso-level that hampers the allocation of overall responsibility to a single
process or product at the micro-level (Hoekstra 2015). A further critical point is
that, although benchmarking the green and blue water footprints against the blue
water availability creates a solution to the overly optimistic estimate of planetary
water boundary under current PBF (Jaramillo and Destouni 2015; Molden 2009),
this comparison is flawed in the sense that the scopes of the water footprint and
boundary metrics are not identical. To improve the comparability of studies that
define environmental sustainability from authors’ point of view, further work needs
to specify the precise realms of application of the production-based and consumptionbased ESRs. But regardless of the choice, it is preferable to define the footprint and
boundary metrics along the same principle, so that both numerator and denominator
are either production-based or consumption-based. In addition, the investigation
into the driving forces behind sustainability gaps is far from an exhaustive factorial analysis, even though it manages to provide an interesting basis for discussion
on the importance and complexity of economic, natural, and demographic factors
for understanding national performance on environmental sustainability. Besides, the