Estimate of historical ecological footprint from formation of agriculture today

Szigeti, Cecília – Tóth, Gergely

Keywords: population, biocapacity, GDP, Maddison, „Earth fullness”

The ecological footprint is by far the most widespread and popular alternative indi-cator. It is best suited for temporary comparisons, much less applicable to compare re-gions, products or companies. However, data has been published by the think-tank Global Footprint Network since 1961 only, so until now, the indicator cannot be used in historical perspectives. We would like to add this data row to the historical statistics ‘scientific movement’. In our model we found an extremely strong correlation between the ecological footprint and GDP, so we were able to estimate the long term EF of the world from historic GDP data, and to compare it with the corresponding figures of world population and biocapacity. We show the proportion we use from the total re-production of planet Earth in different ages. We coined this “Earth fullness”. In the current study we present our results in the ages of the “big jumps” of mankind. From our analysis we have drawn the consequence that the primary factor of unsustainability is overconsumption, not population growth (which tends to culminate anyway). This is because for almost 12 thousand years the fullness of the Earth changed proportionally to the growth of the population, however there has been a dramatic change from the beginning of the industrial revolution and the spread of the current economic para-digm (approximately 1820). The level of consumption and Earth fullness far exceeds the population growth – for the first time in history.

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