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The ecological footprint: an exhibit at an intergenerational trial?

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Abstract

This paper aims at assessing the extent to which the ecological footprint indicator (EF) can be regarded as an exhibit allowing an intergenerational trial about the use of natural resources. For that purpose, we examine various criticisms questioning the relevancy of EF measures for the study of environmental justice between generations. We explore the difficulties raised by the physical—and highly aggregated—nature of EF measures, as well as problems related to the number, the possible non-existence, and the tastes of future generations. The extent to which postulates on nature’s regeneration and technological progress affect the significance of EF studies is also discussed. It is concluded that those criticisms, by identifying various weaknesses of EF measures for the study of intergenerational justice, point to several crucial refinements of existing EF-based analyses.

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Notes

  1. The EF is measured in ‘global hectares’. A global hectare is an aggregated unit of measurement for surface, in which all kinds of biologically productive areas are converted by means of equivalence factors (e.g. an hectare of pasture equals 0.5 global hectares; an hectare of forest equals 1.4 global hectares). See Wackernagel et al. (2005).

  2. See, for instance, the Symposium on the Ecological Footprint in Ecological Economics (2000).

  3. Sources: Global Footprint Network, available online at http://www.footprintnetwork.org.

  4. Criticisms against the purely physical nature of the EF were also made by Ayres (2000), Moffat (2000) and van Kooten and Bulte (2000). For a defence, see Wackernagel and Silverstein (2000).

  5. That fact is acknowledged by Wackernagel and Yount (2000), when they argue that a reduction of footprint does not necessarily reduce human welfare.

  6. Note that the solvability of the fair EF profile under classical utilitarianism requires, under no discounting, a finite number of generations.

  7. Note that the extent to which postponing the use of resources is socially desirable depends on the concavity of temporal welfare: the more concave welfare is in consumption, the lower the gains from saving resources are.

  8. The extent to which this is so depends on the degree of substitutability in the production process (see infra).

  9. For footprint analyses at various aggregated and disaggregated levels, see Wiedmann et al. (2006).

  10. The complexity of the task is well illustrated by the recent treatise of Blackorby et al. (2005). The largest difficulty consists of selecting what Broome (2004) calls a ‘welfare level neutral for existence’ (i.e. making the existence of a person neutral from a social point of view).

  11. The seminal work on discounting on the grounds of the more uncertain existence of future people is Dasgupta and Heal (1979). See also Bommier and Zuber (2006) for recent advances on that issue.

  12. Another limitation of the adaptive tastes criticism arises from the fact that the amount of natural resources consumed by humans depends not only on their tastes, but, also, on how the society is organized (which is something on which individuals have, in the short run, little control). Hence, EF-based analyses remain relevant, as the adaptation of future generations’ tastes cannot avoid a large welfare loss due to limited natural resources.

  13. See also van Vuuren and Bouwman (2005).

  14. On paternalism, see Broome (1994).

  15. On the various laws of reproduction of natural resources, see Clark (1990).

  16. Note that bio-capacity depends not only on natural laws, but, also, on human intervention into ecosystems, and, thus, on technologies. Their evolution in the future is, as discussed in Section ‘The ecological footprint and the knowledge of technological progress’, also difficult to forecast.

  17. Examples of such analyses are provided by Ferng (2002) and Senbel et al. (2003).

  18. See Wackernagel and Silverstein (2000) for a critique of the metrics of money.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Paul-Marie Boulanger, Alexander Cappelen, Paul Cobben, Axel Gosseries, Russell Keat, Jonathan Seglow and Jurgen de Wispelaere for their helpful comments.

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  1. FRS-FNRS, CREPP, HEC-ULg, University of Liege (Belgium), Boulevard du Rectorat, 9, Bâtiment B31, Sart-Tilman, 4000 , Liege, Belgium

    Gregory Ponthiere

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Ponthiere, G. The ecological footprint: an exhibit at an intergenerational trial?. Environ Dev Sustain 11, 677–694 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-007-9136-x

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