What S Your Ecological Footprint?

What S Your Ecological Footprint?

What’s your ecological footprint?

Directions

  1. Go to
  2. Take the quiz as a new user.
  3. Always Click on “Enter Detailed Information”, answer questions, and click “OK”
  4. Record your ecological footrprint.
  5. How many planet Earth’s do you use per year?
  6. Break down your ecological footprint:
  7. ____% Food
  8. ____%Shelter
  9. ____%Mobility
  10. ____%Goods
  11. ____%Services
  12. How many tons of carbon dioxide do you generate?
  13. How many global acres of the Earth’s productive area do you require?
  14. Put the following in order from most land used to least land used: energy land, crop land, grazing land, forest land, built up land, fishing grounds
  15. What is a global acre? (Click on the question mark to the right of fishing grounds)
  16. Click on “explore scenarios” under “Can you reduce your Ecological Footprint?”
  17. Click on the checkboxes one at a time.
  18. How do the listed activities affect your ecological footprint in terms of the number of planet Earth’s needed?
  19. If every American did only one of these activities, which would be the most effective in reducing our ecological footrprint?
  20. Could you commit to doing one or more of these activities? If so, which one(s)? If not, why?
  21. Click on “edit your footprint”. How low could you get your footprint to be and what would you need to do to meet that goal?

Reflection Questions:

  1. Gather data from everyone in the class concerning their footrprint in global acres.
  2. What is the total footprint of the class?
  3. What is the average footprint of the class?
  4. How does this compare to the average American’s footprint (23.7 global acres/person)?
  5. The total biocapacity of the Earth is estimated to be 4.4 global acres/person. Is our class running an ecological deficit or an ecological surplus?
  6. Think about the fairness of world land use. The US has an ecological footprint of 23.7 acres per person while the 35 low income countries average 2.0 acres per person.
  7. Do you think there should be laws governing how large a country’s or individuals ecological footprint?
  8. Are there other ways to convince people to reduce their ecological footprint.
  9. Overshoot occurs when we use more of Earth’s resources in a given period of time than can be regenerated within that same period. An example would be if we cutting trees down faster than they can grow or catching fish faster than they reproduce. The Earth first experienced overshoot on December 19, 1987. In 2007 overshoot day occurred on October 6, 2007.

Use the following formula to calculate overshoot day:

[ world biocapacity / Ecological Footprint ] x 365 = Ecological Debt Day

World biocapacity=4.4 global acres/person

  1. When is overshoot day for the world? (ecological footprint =5.5)
  2. When is overshoot day for the US (US biocapacity= 11.7; US ecological footprint =23.7)
  3. When is overshoot day for our clas (US biocapacity=11.7; class ecological footprint=answer to reflection question 1b)
Top View