The Ecofootprint Report

Plymouth's Ecofootprint Report was published by the Environment and Sustainability Partnership in May 2005 and is supported by Plymouth City Council and the Environment Agency.

An ‘Ecological Footprint’ (also referred to as an ‘ecofootprint’ or EF) is the area of land a person, community, organisation or region would need to sustainably maintain their activities. The outcomes enable us to monitor our resource use and our progress towards a more sustainable society. Ecofootprints also help to make sustainable decisions and to inform decision makers of the options available.

Our lifestyles can affect the sustainability of the city in many ways. The analysis of Plymouth’s ‘Ecofootprint’ in this report shows that we would need at least 5 hectares of land to provide each inhabitant of Plymouth with their needs for food, transport and energy regardless of their current lifestyle. As we have a population of approximately 240,000, we would need over 1,200,000 global hectares to keep the whole city going.

If you shared out all the productive land available on Earth, and took account of the needs of the other species we share it with, you would find that only 1.6 hectares per person would be available - less than a third of what we are already using.

In this respect, Plymouth’s lifestyle is clearly not sustainable. But what can we do about it?

Documents

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Plymouth’s Ecofootprint: a first step - influencing choice and change in a sustainable way. File format Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 581KB