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The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earth's ecosystems, the amount of natural capital used each year. The footprint of a region can be contrasted with the natural resources it generates.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/National_Footprint_Accounts_Method_Paper_2010.pdf )〕 A common type of footprint estimates the amount of biologically productive land and sea area necessary to supply the resources a human population consumes, and to assimilate the waste that population produces. At a global scale, this has been used by some ecological analysts to estimate how rapidly we are depleting limited resources, vs. using renewable resources. The Global Footprint Network, for instance, is an ecological organization that calculates a global ecological footprint from UN and other data, and publishes the result. They estimate that as of 2007, the planet uses up major ecological resources 1.5 times as fast as they are being renewed. ==Footprint measurements== In 2007, the Global Footprint Network estimated the global ecological footprint as "1.5 planet Earths"; that is, they judged that ecological services were being used 1.5 times as quickly as they were being renewed. Ecological footprints can be calculated at any scale: for an activity, a person, a community, a city, a region, a nation or humanity as a whole. Cities, due to population concentration, have large ecological footprints and have become ground zero for footprint reduction.〔(【引用サイトリンク】work=academia.edu )〕 There is no fixed way to measuring such footprints, and any attempts to describe the capacity of an ecosystem in a single number is a massive simplification of thousands of key renewable resources, which are not used or replenished at the same rate. However, there has been some convergence of metrics and standards since 2006. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ecological footprint」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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