{"title":"Environmental footprint analysis of an urban community and its surrounding bioregion","authors":"G. P. Hammond, Trevor Iddenden, Jane Wildblood","doi":"10.1680/jurdp.21.00002","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":44716,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers-Urban Design and Planning","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5000,"publicationDate":"2022-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers-Urban Design and Planning","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1680/jurdp.21.00002","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"URBAN STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
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.