AnalysesSwitzerland's ecological footprint

The main cause of this large footprint is our energy consumption
Energy accounts for three-fourths of the ecological footprint, making it the most significant factor overall. Moreover, the energy footprint has also grown more rapidly over the last few decades than any other factor. Use of cropland, forest and prairies is another major factor, accounting for 22% of the total footprint.

We live at the cost of other world regions or future generations
Our country's ecological footprint has exceeded its biocapacity for several decades now. The only way to maintain this unsustainable lifestyle is either to drastically overexploit our own natural resources or to import natural resources from other countries.

Mankind consumes the Earth’s natural resources faster than the Earth’s regenerative capacity
The world’s per-capita biocapacity is 0.6 gha less than its per-capita footprint. Switzerland’s per capita footprint is about the same as the EU-15 average. North America and Western Europe consume up to five times more than world’s available biocapacity of 2.1 gha. The countries of Southeast Asia and Africa, in contrast, use up much less biocapacity per capita.

Link to the report: Switzerland's ecological footprint - a contribution to the sustainability debate

The ecological footprint is a kind of “resource accounting”
It determines to what extent humans reduce the Earth’s regenerative capacity (biocapacity). The method takes into account intensity of consumption and depletion of natural resources caused by activities such as agriculture, energy use and wood consumption to calculate exactly how much physical space would be required to ensure sustainability. This hypothetical physical space requirement, expressed in gha, is referred to as the ecological footprint and covers all forms of consumption. The ecological footprint shows the extent to which consumption of natural resources exceeds the biocapacity of a given region. When a region's footprint and biocapacity are equal, the region is in harmony with its natural capacity. It is ecologically sustainable.

The study of Switzerland’s footprint was commissioned and published by the Federal Office for Spatial Development, the Federal Statistical Office, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the Federal Office for the Environment in cooperation with Global Footprint Network. The study also made it possible to compare Global Footprint Network data (based on international sources) with official Swiss statistics. The findings from the study demonstrated that their data very closely matched our own.