5.5 Research Agenda for Strengthening the Footprint–boundary …
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That is to say, ESA is also a substitution problem in addition to its scaling dimension. A precedent for this is the combination of ecological footprint and biocapacity
into a single score, where the weighting scheme has always been steeped in controversy (Kitzes and Wackernagel 2009; Lenzen and Murray 2001). The critiques mainly
arise from the misinterpretation it may create that the scarcity of carrying capacity
for one land’s footprint is always allowed to be counteracted by the unconsumed
carrying capacity within the boundaries of other lands. Moreover, the lack of differentiation between aggregated issues (e.g., land use) and systemic issues (e.g., carbon
emissions) represents another defect in the ecological footprint analysis (EFA), as
well as in typical footprint family studies. A partial solution might be to present the
results both at the aggregate and disaggregate levels in keeping with the divergent
requirements of policy makers and scientists.
5.6 Conclusions
This chapter investigates the complementary linkages between environmental footprints and planetary boundaries originating from two leading communities in the
fields of ecological and environmental sciences and doing something quite similar
but with their own strengths and weaknesses and surprisingly lacking communication and mutual understanding. The environmental footprints are broadly accepted
as a representative of pressure or impact in relation to resource extractions and
hazardous emissions, and human knowledge of planetary boundaries provides a set of
consensus-based estimates of the regenerative and absorptive capacity of the Earth’s
life-supporting systems. Although the conceptual roots, calculation methods, and
policy relevance of different footprints vary widely, in aggregate they show significant
similarity to planetary boundaries in terms of environmental coverage.
Both tools are found to be limited in their ability to handle sustainability issues.
On the one hand, environmental footprints focus typically on measuring and minimizing environmental impacts without seeing if such operationalization is truly in a
sustainable way, with some exceptions including the ecological, carbon, water, and
chemical footprints, where global and regional threshold measurements are nevertheless far from satisfactory. Misleading conclusions and wrong decisions could be
made in the case that the distinction between sustainable and unsustainable activities
is vague, ambiguous, or missing at all. On the other hand, while a rough estimate
of current human activities is provided in the existing planetary boundaries research
besides threshold estimates, it is criticized for the sole use of expert knowledge and
lack of quantitative consensus models, which likely lead to unreliable or even false
results.
In view of the differing emphases and challenges of footprints and boundaries,
it is our conviction that the two metrics should not be viewed as alternatives but
rather as complements. The synthesizing of environmental footprints and planetary
boundaries makes it possible to benchmark human contemporary footprints against
maximum sustainable footprints (Hoekstra and Wiedmann 2014), and thereby to
85
That is to say, ESA is also a substitution problem in addition to its scaling dimension. A precedent for this is the combination of ecological footprint and biocapacity
into a single score, where the weighting scheme has always been steeped in controversy (Kitzes and Wackernagel 2009; Lenzen and Murray 2001). The critiques mainly
arise from the misinterpretation it may create that the scarcity of carrying capacity
for one land’s footprint is always allowed to be counteracted by the unconsumed
carrying capacity within the boundaries of other lands. Moreover, the lack of differentiation between aggregated issues (e.g., land use) and systemic issues (e.g., carbon
emissions) represents another defect in the ecological footprint analysis (EFA), as
well as in typical footprint family studies. A partial solution might be to present the
results both at the aggregate and disaggregate levels in keeping with the divergent
requirements of policy makers and scientists.
5.6 Conclusions
This chapter investigates the complementary linkages between environmental footprints and planetary boundaries originating from two leading communities in the
fields of ecological and environmental sciences and doing something quite similar
but with their own strengths and weaknesses and surprisingly lacking communication and mutual understanding. The environmental footprints are broadly accepted
as a representative of pressure or impact in relation to resource extractions and
hazardous emissions, and human knowledge of planetary boundaries provides a set of
consensus-based estimates of the regenerative and absorptive capacity of the Earth’s
life-supporting systems. Although the conceptual roots, calculation methods, and
policy relevance of different footprints vary widely, in aggregate they show significant
similarity to planetary boundaries in terms of environmental coverage.
Both tools are found to be limited in their ability to handle sustainability issues.
On the one hand, environmental footprints focus typically on measuring and minimizing environmental impacts without seeing if such operationalization is truly in a
sustainable way, with some exceptions including the ecological, carbon, water, and
chemical footprints, where global and regional threshold measurements are nevertheless far from satisfactory. Misleading conclusions and wrong decisions could be
made in the case that the distinction between sustainable and unsustainable activities
is vague, ambiguous, or missing at all. On the other hand, while a rough estimate
of current human activities is provided in the existing planetary boundaries research
besides threshold estimates, it is criticized for the sole use of expert knowledge and
lack of quantitative consensus models, which likely lead to unreliable or even false
results.
In view of the differing emphases and challenges of footprints and boundaries,
it is our conviction that the two metrics should not be viewed as alternatives but
rather as complements. The synthesizing of environmental footprints and planetary
boundaries makes it possible to benchmark human contemporary footprints against
maximum sustainable footprints (Hoekstra and Wiedmann 2014), and thereby to