ABSTRACT
The topic of the conference session for which this contribution was originally made was formulated as an objective: securing everybody’s quality of life within the means of nature. This objective, although sometimes worded differently, is also referred to as sustainable development. The concept of sustainable development has become (at least officially) a widely accepted goal of national and international policy making, since it was used by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) to advocate a kind of development that would not only aim for economic objectives per se but also include a fuller sense of human and ecological well-being (WCED, 1987). Since 1987, considerable attention has been paid to developing indicators that could support decision making in this context (e.g., Hammond et al., 1995; Meadows, 1998). The ecological footprint (EF) has frequently been mentioned as one of these. The EF is defined as the amount of the world’s environmental resources required to support the consumption of a defined population regardless of where this capacity is used (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996).
