Environmental footprint analysis of an urban community and its surrounding bioregion

Abstract

Environmental or ‘ecological’ footprints have been widely used as partial indicators of sustainability; specifically of resource consumption and waste absorption transformed in terms of the biologically productive land area required by a population. The environmental footprint of the Unitary Authority of Bath & North East Somerset (BANES) in the South West of England (UK) has been estimated in terms of global hectares (gha) required per capita. BANES has a population of about 184,870 and covers an area of 35,200 hectares, of which two-thirds is on ‘green belt’ land. The UNESCO World Heritage City of Bath is the principal settlement, but there are also a number of smaller urban communities scattered amongst its surrounding area (‘hinterland’ or ‘bioregion’). The overall footprint for BANES was estimated to be 3.77 gha per capita (gha/cap), which is well above its biocapacity of 0.67 gha/cap and ‘Earthshare’ of 1.80 gha per capita. Direct Energy use was found to exhibit the largest footprint component (a 31% share), followed by Materials & Waste (30%), Food & Drink (25%), Transport (10%) and Built Land (4%), whereas the Water footprint was negligibly small (∼0%) by comparison. Such data provides a baseline for assessing their planning strategies for future development.