16
Sustainability and the built environment
area is required to produce the resources a population consumes and to absorb the
corresponding waste. It is an approach which can also be applied to a particular
activity, such as manufacturing a product or driving a car. This ‘resource accounting’
calculates the consumption of energy, biomass (food), building material, water
and other resources, and converts it into a measure of land area called the ‘global
hectare’. The global hectare allows us broadly to quantify how equipped we are to live
as we do.
Thus the ecological footprint:
• offers a snapshot view of environmental impact
• illustrates the environmental impact of changes in consumption
• makes a crucial link between local activities and global effects.
There are numerous web-based calculators through which individual, corporate or
institutional footprints can be calculated. A simple one is at www.bestfootforward.
com/footprintlife.htm.
One Planet Living
Gro Harlem Brundtland once said that ‘if seven billion people were to consume as
much energy and resources as we do in the West today we would need 10 worlds, not
one, to satisfy all our needs’. One Planet Living, which is a global initiative developed
jointly by independent environmental organisation BioRegional and the World Wildlife
Fund, builds on the idea of the ecological footprint. It calculates the footprint of an
average citizen and multiplies it by global population to give an indication of our
overall position relative to the benchmark of one planet for us all.
With this in mind, the second part of our paper looks at how our existing built
environment contributes to environmental depletion and climate change.

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