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The ecological footprint logo for ‘Northern Limits’
Is Northern Ireland Putting Its Best Foot Forward
Contributed by:
Mariam Saleemi
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Results from major study, Northern Limits, a resource flow analysis and ecological footprint for Northern Ireland, revealed that if everyone in the world were to consume at the rate of Northern Irish people we would need three planets to be sustainable!
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Overview
Results from major study, Northern Limits, a resource flow analysis and ecological footprint for Northern Ireland, revealed that if everyone in the world were to consume at the rate of Northern Irish people we would need three planets to be sustainable!
The report took eighteen months of research by a project team which included EnviroCentre, Best Foot Forward and Queen’s University Belfast. The team gathered data on all aspects of the Northern Ireland economy including energy consumption and materials use, food production and consumption, and waste production in a bid to calculate Northern Ireland’s resource efficiency and its ecological footprint.
Ecological Foot printing is a means of measuring and communicating sustainable resource use that will estimate the area of land needed for Northern Ireland to function sustainably. That means the Ecological Footprint of Northern Ireland would be the total area of productive land and sea required to produce all the crops, meat, seafood, wood and fibre we use, our energy consumption and the space we use for our infrastructure.
The study showed that Northern Ireland’s population of 1,685,267 consumed some 60,741 GigaWatt (GWh) hours of energy, producing 15 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in a year. In an average year some 7,005,990 tonnes of municipal, commercial and industrial waste was produced, 92.6% of municipal waste was land filled and 7.4% was recycled, reused or composted. The Ecological Footprint of Northern Ireland residents was 5.63 gha compared with the UK average of 5.45 gha per person.
However all is not lost, there are simple things people in Northern Ireland can do to reduce the impact they have on the planet an help improve Northern Ireland’s future sustainability. Project Director, Dr Robin Curry said: “We can do small things to help like start to reduce our waste, switch off electricity, gas and oil appliances when not in use and travel less by car. In one year, Northern Ireland residents travelled 17.5 billion passenger-kms, of which 76% was by car. This has a huge impact on our footprint.”
The Ecological Footprint is a resource accounting tool used to address underlying sustainability questions. It measures the extent to which humanity is using nature's resources faster than they can regenerate. It illustrates who uses how much of which ecological resources, with populations defined either geographically or socially. And, it shows to what extent humans dominate the biosphere at the expense of wild species.
The Ecological Footprint clarifies the relationship of resource use to equity by explicitly tying individuals' and groups' activities to ecological demands. These connections help decision makers more accurately and equitably shape policy in support of social and environmental justice.
Dr Robin Curry concluded: “We hope that the framework that has been created will be put to use in producing a sustainable development strategy for Northern Ireland, which has at its core, informed, evidence-based policy making.”
The 1970s and 1980s saw a growing recognition that traditional patterns of economic development were leading to conflicts with the carrying capacity of the planet, in terms of population growth, pollution and consumption of resources.
This culminated in 1987 with the establishment of the World Commission on Environment and Development chaired by the Prime Minister of Norway, Mrs Gro Harlem Bruntland. The Commission set out the following definition of sustainable development: “Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable – development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
The Bruntland report was followed by the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and Rio+10 in Johannesburg in 2002. Throughout this time many people, like Dr Robin Curry, have been working towards the development of methods that allow us to quantify our impacts on the environment. Northern Limits has been a massive contribution to measuring Northern Ireland’s Ecological Footprint. Let’s hope the people of Northern Ireland realise the impact they are having on the environment and take their first few steps to treading softly on the earth.
Key features
consumption
energy
environmental assessment
land use
materials
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