Assessing the Ecological Footprint and biocapacity of Portuguese cities: Critical results for environmental awareness and local management
| Autor: | Katsunori Iha, Maria Serena Mancini, Alessandro Galli, Armando Alves, Sara Moreno Pires, David Lin, Mathis Wackernagel, Golnar Zokai, Adeline Murthy |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
education.field_of_study
Ecological footprint Sociology and Political Science Corporate governance 05 social sciences Population 0211 other engineering and technologies 0507 social and economic geography Public policy 021107 urban & regional planning 02 engineering and technology Development Natural resource Ecosystem services Urban Studies Tourism Leisure and Hospitality Management Sustainability Business Biocapacity education 050703 geography Environmental planning |
| Zdroj: | CIÊNCIAVITAE |
| ISSN: | 0264-2751 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.cities.2019.102442 |
| Popis: | The unsustainable use of our planet's resources needs to be tackled from different angles and multiple levels of governance. As the human population urbanizes, having access to reliable, cross-cutting, quantitative city-level sustainability metrics is key to understanding the environmental impacts of urban dwellers and the role cities can play in the 21st century sustainability challenge. Framing the environmental pillar of urban sustainability with an overarching metric like the Ecological Footprint informs stakeholders and citizens about a city's overall pressure on the biosphere. In Portugal, six cities established a pioneering collaborative project to guide their transition to sustainability and support city governance; this paper presents the results of the first phase of the project. We tracked annual demand for natural resources and ecological services by the city residents and compared it against the “carrying capacity” of the cities' ecological assets. We then assessed the ability of this new data to increase local environmental awareness and support local public policies in Portugal and elsewhere. Lessons from this study inform the ongoing debate on the Ecological Footprint's usefulness as sustainability metric for cities, and point to specific policy insights for managing key consumption sectors and reaching key targets such as the UN SDGs. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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