2.3 Elaboration of a Footprint Family
23
Table 2.3 Summary of approaches applied to the studies of ecological, energy, carbon, and water
footprints from the literature
Object/scale
Ecological
footprint
Energy footprint
Carbon footprint Water footprint
Product/
food/
energy
LCA
(Huijbregts
et al. 2008)
Bottom-up
approach (Šantek
et al. 2010)
LCA
(Carballo-Penela
and Doménech
2010)
LCA (Ridoutt and
Pfister 2010)
Bottom-up
approach
(Simmons et al.
2000)
Top-down approach
(Stöglehner 2003)
Hybrid approach
(Virtanen et al.
2011)
Bottom-up
approach
(Chapagain et al.
2006b)
Top-down
approach
(Mamouni
Limnios et al.
2009)
Top-down
approach (Van
Oel et al. 2009)
Organization/
sector/
trade/
building
IOA (Hubacek
and Giljum
2003)
IOA (Ferng 2002)
IOA (Huang et al.
2009)
IOA (Steen-Olsen
et al. 2012)
Bottom-up
approach
(Simmons et al.
2000)
Top-down approach
(Chen and Lin
2008)
LCA (Sanyé et al.
2012)
Bottom-up
approach (Van
Oel et al. 2009)
Top-down
approach
(Bastianoni
et al. 2007)
NFA (Browne et al.
2009)
Hybrid approach
(Berners-Lee
et al. 2011)
Top-down
approach (Van
Oel et al. 2009)
Emergy (Zhao
et al. 2013)
NFA-PLUM
(Wiedmann 2009a)
Region/nation/
World
IOA (Lenzen
et al. 2012)
NFA (Chen and Lin
2008)
IOA (Hertwich
and Peters 2009)
IOA (Zhao et al.
2009)
NFA
(Wackernagel
and Rees 1996)
Bottom-up
approach
(Hoekstra and
Mekonnen 2012)
NFA-NPP
(Venetoulis and
Talberth 2008)
MEA
(Burkhard et al.
2012)
Emergy (Zhao
et al. 2005)
Exergy (Chen
and Chen 2007)
Note: When the authors do not specify the approaches used in their research, we roughly categorize
them into the bottom-up category and the top-down category.