ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT FROM THE SUSTAINABILITY PERSPECTIVE

The paper studied the importance of Ecological Footprint (EF) for estimating the biologically productive area. Since the Ecological Footprint is a measure of renewable biocapacity, we argue that some dimensions of ecological sustainability should not be included in the Ecological Footprint. These include human activities that should be phased out to obtain sustainability, such as emissions of persistent compounds foreign to nature and qualitative aspects that represent secondary uses of ecological areas and do not, therefore, occupy a clearly identifiable additional ecological space. We also conclude that the Ecological Footprint is useful for documenting the overall human use or abuse of the potentially renewable functions and services of nature. Particularly, by aggregating in a consistent way a variety of human impacts, it can effectively identify the scale of the human economy by comparison with the size of the biosphere