By Owen Liu, Peninsula Press
QUESTION:I have often heard questions about assessing the environmental impact of A versus B answered with a common metric in order to compare apples to apples. The metrics are usually in quantity of carbon released or in dollars. Is there a more sophisticated environmental impact index out there that encompasses multiple metrics at once? Asked by Jana Watson-Capps, Longmount, Colo.
ANSWER: You pose an excellent question: while a one-metric method might comprehensively answer environmental impact questions for drying your hands or going vegetarian, using a more holistic assessment is crucial in assessing other environmental conundrums.
The “ecological footprint analysis,” one of the most user-friendly and well-documented options, is a comprehensive measure of human impact on ecosystems and resources and incorporates many more factors than the more commonly calculated “carbon footprint” metric. The ecological footprint analysis has its basis in the notion of carrying capacity, or the maximum population size that an environment’s natural resources can sustain. Therefore, the ecological footprint for any given activity, project or population is expressed as the area of land and water that would theoretically be required to sustain it indefinitely. Continue Reading >>