Why sustainability?
If we imagine that our city is isolated from the rest of the world by a glass globe and could only use the resources present inside that globe, we would soon come to the conclusion that its resources wouldn’t support us for a long time. Now imagining that the globe could be as big as we needed it to be, involving surrounding areas composed by all the different land types we have on earth, in the same proportion that they exist on earth, the area occupied by the globe would represent the city’s ecological footprints.
Ecological footprints can be calculated for an individual, a city, a country, considering mainly our energy use (electric, gas, oil, etc) our level of consumption and our travel habits. Many methods of calculation have been proposed and can be found on some websites. A list of those websites can be found at our "Other Resourses" section.
This tool can put our consumption levels into perspective. An average North American footprint measures four to five hectares, which means that if everyone on Earth lived like the average Canadian or North American, it would take three planets to produce the resources and absorb the wastes of our society, or in other words, to maintain life-support capacity