Assessing the Ecological Footprint and biocapacity of Portuguese cities: Critical results for environmental awareness and local management

《Assessing the Ecological Footprint and biocapacity of Portuguese cities: Critical results for environmental awareness and local management》

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作者: Alessandro Galli;Katsunori Iha;Sara Moreno Pires;Maria Serena Mancini;Armando Alves;Golnar Zokai;David Lin;Adeline Murthy;Mathis Wackernagel

关键字: Carrying capacity;Sub-national studies;SDGs;Local governance;Sustainable cities;Environmental policy

作者单位: Global Footprint Network, Avenue Louis-Casaï, 18, 1209 Geneva, Switzerland;Global Footprint Network, 426 17th Street, Suite 700, Oakland, CA 94612, USA;Department of Social, Political and Territorial Sciences, University of Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal;Global Footprint Network, Avenue Louis-Casaï, 18, 1209 Geneva, Switzerland;Global Footprint Network, 426 17th Street, Suite 700, Oakland, CA 94612, USA;Department of Social, Political and Territorial Sciences, University of Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal

摘要: 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.