The term „ecological footprint” was first used in 1998 and it means the area of land required by a

society to fulfil all their resoursce needs and assimilate all their wastes.

If a country has an ecological footprint X times bigger than its geographical area then it means a
certain country needs a land area X Times bigger than it already is.

Ecological footprints may have many uses, they can e.g. compare LIC’s and HIC’s and they give
information about countries’ consuming resources as well as assimilating their wastes.

After a research it was estimilated that in 10 years from now, current human population will need
two more planets equivalent to Earth, otherwise it will be impossible to supply the world’s
population.

There were a few days when people have used all the resources (helping the Earth to regenerate),
we call them Earth Overshoot Days.

There’s a lot of stuff that has an influence on increasing ecological footprints. It could be: having a
meat-rich diet, relying heavily on fossil fuels or large consumption of food per person. But there are
also a few ways to reduce it, e.g. recycling and reusing resources or using technology to intensify land
use. We, as a human population, try to increase the amount of resources. However, we are still
working on improving the ideas for reducing ecological footprints, because it’s a huge problem,
especially for High-Income Countries.

Laura Jastrzębska and Wiktoria Zakrzewska, 2F