Can eco-footprinting analysis be used successfully to encourage more sustainable behaviour at the household level?

The human family is currently on an unsustainable development path, which is likely to lead to a full blown environmental crisis. Humanity is overshooting nature's carrying capacity by over 20%. In the absence of politically applied environmental limits to growth, some authors believe the solution to environmental sustainability has to include a bottom-up approach, whereby individuals are encouraged to take action to reduce their own environmental impact. One factor that has limited the potential to develop this approach to date has been the inability to measurably personalize the link between global unsustainable consumption and individual lifestyles. Ecological footprinting analysis (EFA) has the potential to bridge this gap. EFA aggregates a range of individual consumption and waste components and converts them into the bioproductive land area required to support this activity. This empirical pilot study tests whether there is scope to utilize EFA at the household level to see whether it can be used to encourage changes in behaviour towards less resource intensive lifestyles. The results support this hypothesis in that all participating households took some action to reduce their ecological footprints. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

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