Ecological Foot Print Analysis Essay

The ecological footprint is a mathematical tool that was developed by Doctor Mathis Wackernagel and Professor William Rees in 1992 to calculate how many hectares of land or acres of land are required to support one human being. Humans use up the planets’ natural resources to survive on a daily basis. These resources include fish, forests, land, water, and other agricultural products. In an aspect, we can think of humans as parasites to the planet Earth because it is our host and we need its resources to survive. Within the means of the ecological footprint, we want to look closely as the production of Earth’s resources, against the consumption rate of the human race. We can think of the ecological foot print analysis as an approach to a global

As previously established, the ecological foot print is a measure in hectares of how much land is required to support someone’s means of life. You can calculate the ecological foot print in two ways, one as a whole for a country, or as an individual. There are two common calculation methods for the ecological foot print analysis: the component based calculation and the compound calculation. Component based calculation builds up the total ecological foot print through an item by item approach, but the compound based calculation starts from the overall consumption balance. It takes into account the carrying capacity for an ecosystem, and how many people can use up the land in that ecosystem to survive at a decent level. Another source provides the actual mathematical equation for the ecological foot print analysis: “EF= P/YN*YF*EQF, where P is the amount of a product harvested or waste emitted, YN is the national average yield for P, YF is the yield factor, and EQF is the equivalence factor”, (Zakari, R., Zolfagharian, S., Nourbakhsh, M., Zin, R. M., & Gheisari, M. (2012)). The carrying capacity of the human race is the maximum rate of resource consumption and waste production. To determine the total ecological footprint as a whole, we add up all the mutually exclusive zones of land use: pasture land, agricultural