Your Ecological Footprint, or Eco-footprint, is one of the simplest measures of how sustainable you are. Your eco-footprint is the area of land and sea that supplies all of the ‘stuff’ that you need to live – land for your home, your food, the energy you use plus all the materials in what you buy. About ten percent of your footprint is also set-aside for the space needed by other plants and animals to live on the planet.

When this is added together, the average UK citizen has an eco-footprint of about 5 hectares – roughly the size of 6 football pitches. If everyone in the world used this amount of land, we would need 3 planets to live one… but we only have one. This is proof that we are consuming more than our planet can provide in the long term. WWF-UK, one of Sunderland City Council's partners, has developed a web-toolkit, to help you measure and reduce your own eco-footprint - follow the link below. Calculate your own eco-footprint Or for more tips on how to reduce your footprint, see our own summary: Reduce your footprint using our list of top-five tips

Sunderland's Eco-footprint

To understand the city’s impact on the global environment, since 2003 Sunderland City Council has been working with WWF-UK and Stockholm Environment Institute to work out the city’s eco-footprint. Sunderland’s eco-footprint is 5.24 hectares per person, which is lower than the North East average of 5.31 hectares. This accounts for the city’s own greenhouse gas emissions and the impact of goods imported into Sunderland from around the world.

Community groups helped develop the eco-footprint over 2004-2005, and the study formed part of a much wider regional and national project, called Ecological-Budget UK, lead by WWF-UK and funded by Biffaward, in which Sunderland put itself forward as a pilot city to be footprinted.

Now that the city’s and the region’s “eco-footprint” has been published in May 2006 (see links below), awareness material and a toolkit is being developed to help residents, organisations and businesses first understand, and then reduce, their own impact on the global environment.

Counting Consumption - Ecological Footprint of the North East ( pdf 1.41MB)
Ecological Budget UK - website of WWF's national ecofootprinting project.

[Back to Sustainability Home Page]