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An Exploration of the Variables Driving the Ecological Footprint for the Chicago Metropolitan Area
Citation:
Argoti-Caicedo, A., A. Dewey, H. Cabezas, AND B. Demeke. An Exploration of the Variables Driving the Ecological Footprint for the Chicago Metropolitan Area. International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technology, Buffalo, NY, June 25 - 28, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been expanding the concept of integrated sustainability assessment at the regional and community levels in its research programs. In this regard, this study is part of a multidisciplinary research project on the quantitative assessment of urban sustainability and management. In this study, the Ecological Footprint (EF) is computed, using publicly available data, to assess the sustainability trends of the Chicago Metropolitan Area between 1990 and 2015. The results of our analyses indicate that there is no evidence the region is moving away from sustainability. The major factors contributing to the magnitude of Ecological Footprint and its trends are energy, timber and beef consumption. We expect that the method and results will serve as a template for assessing regional sustainability using Ecological Footprint methodology. The research is of interest to city planners, regional sustainability planners, and researchers interested in assessing sustainability of any region.
Description:
We have estimated the Ecological Footprint (EF) of the Chicago Metropolitan Area (CMA) between 1990 and 2013. EF is a metric that accounts for a region’s ecological balance by comparing the regional supply of natural resources to the corresponding demand on those resources. We deploy the EF’s temporal trend as an indicator of whether the CMA is moving towards or away from sustainability. Consequently, the insight provided by EF is invaluable for the region because it can facilitate the planning and execution of sustainability policies, it aids on the identification of constraints, and it helps track the region’s progress towards sustainability. In particular, the policies that could be developed by assessing the region’s sustainability via EF should lead to improved regional sustainability, thereby benefiting current and future generations. Such policies are usually crafted to guarantee resource conservation or to minimize the impacts of human consumption on the region’s environment over time. In this regard, we have also attempted to identify the most important consumption trends that are responsible for significant changes in the regional EF over time; this identification is performed in two steps. In the first step, the region’s EF is estimated by following the methodology of EF analysis in the available literature, which considers six categories of bioproductive space, specifically, energy, arable, forest, pasture, and built-up lands as well as lake area. Subsequently, the various items consumed by the region’s population are allocated to one of these space categories and the CMA’s EF is computed by quantifying the amount per capita of each space category required to sustain the consumption of the region’s population. Moreover, the CMA’s ecological supply is determined by accounting for the amount per capita of each space category that is available in the region. Finally, the ecological balance is computed by subtracting the region’s EF from the corresponding ecological supply. In the second step, we compare the temporal trends of the main consumption items considered to those of the EF and ecological balance to identify the consumption items that most probably are driving the EF’s trend. To facilitate the comparison, the values of the consumption items, EF, and ecological balance are normalized with respect to a reference year. Our preliminarily observations indicate that energy and beef consumption appear to be driving the general trend of the regional EF. We expect that the results of this exploration will serve as a guide for the development of policies that promote the sustainable evolution of the region.