ABSTRACT
Residents of urban centers in high-income countries consume vast resources and generate immense volumes of waste to maintain their lifestyles [1,2]. Their levels of resource use and waste production make urban centers major contributors to global ecological change: increasing atmospheric carbon, global depletion of renewable and non-renewable resources, and ecological systems overload [3,4,5,6,7]. Many local governments are engaging in efforts to monitor and reduce these impacts, for example, using the ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability GHG Emissions Analysis Protocol [8] to measure their contributions to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. While indeed such measurement is critical [9], we suggest that a comprehensive account of urban demands on global renewable resources and ecosystems is equally warranted. Urban
ecological footprint analysis (EFA) aims to account for the full scope of energy and materials appropriated by a city’s residents, businesses and operations; its biophysical inputs (i.e., various types of biologically productive land); and the carbon dioxide emissions produced as wastes. Indeed several cities have been engaged in measuring the size of their ecological footprints and using the ecological footprint as a policy communication tool: stressing the need for dramatic reform of urban based consumption and waste production toward ecologically sustainable levels. However, data requirements, including limited city-scale data, have prevented EFA from being fully employed as a local planning and monitoring tool [10,11].
