Potential of the Ecological Footprint for monitoring environmental impact from natural resource use

Assessment of the potential of the Ecological Footprint and related tools and indicators to measure negative environmental impacts related to natural resource use as called for in the Thematic Strategy on the Sustainable Use of Natural Resources.

Through its Resources Strategy, the European Commission is undertaking an effort to use natural resources in a sustainable way, and more specifically, to decouple economic growth from environmental impacts.

This project provides an evaluation of the Ecological Footprint (EF) as a potential indicator for this purpose, and an assessment of whether a combination of the Ecological Footprint with other related tools and indicators could fulfil these requirements. The project will elaborate the specific advantages and shortcomings of the Ecological Footprint and will assess whether and how other indicators could complement the Ecological Footprint.

The project will be orientated towards potential policy applications in the EU and will reach beyond the level of assessing only the methodological soundness of the Ecological Footprint and complementary measures. In addition, the tasks to be performed in this project will incorporate the views of stakeholders and experts.

The project has three main tasks:

1. An assessment of the potential of the Ecological Footprint as an aggregated indicator to measure resource-specific impacts as called for in the Thematic Strategy on the Sustainable Use of Natural Resources.

2. An assessment of how other assessment tools can complement the Ecological Footprint in combination to fulfil EU policy requirements (eg. through development of a basket of aggregated indicators capable of monitoring the environmental impact of natural resource use).

3. Identification of essential improvements needed in the Ecological Footprint methodology in the next 1 to 5 years.

Within in this project, SERI is responsible for task 2 and will evaluate a large number of potential methods, tools and indicators with regard to their potential for measuring environmental impacts of resource use.