What Good Are Footprints?
Thursday, February 27, 2014 - 23:30
in Earth & Climate
The notion of environmental "footprinting" as a way to represent the impact of human activity on the planet's environment has become a veritable industry over the last two decades. Since the concept first gained popularity in the 1990s — when it was introduced by researchers William E. Rees and Mathis Wackernagel — footprinting has been used to explain a range of complicated phenomena as a single metric, spawning carbon footprints, water footprints, and various other indicators to communicate the carrying capacity of Earth. read more