The Living Planet Index, which monitors the health of ecosystems, declined by 30% during 1970-2003. This global trend suggests that we are destroying the natural ecosystems at an unprecedented rate in the human history. If the biosphere productivity cannot be balanced by the human consumption and his waste production, the biodiversity would also be damaged. This growing pressure on ecosystems is causing habitat degradation and has permanent or temporary effects on their productivity (GFN, 2007). This effect, however temporary, results in the destruction of ecological capital on which our economy depends, such as groundwater depletion, destruction of fisheries, CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, and deforestation. The human economy is a subset
Computations are needed to identify the demand of humans on nature and the supply of resources by nature in order to protect the natural capital. The supply and demand balance is essential to setting goals and developing sustainability policies (Wackernagel et al., 2005:2). “Ecological footprint” is a measure proposed for measuring sustainability. It indicates the critical natural capital required for a given economy or a population in terms of biologically productive areas (Donald and Patterson, 2003:
To simplify the complex analyzes in the basic method, a number of researchers established a land use-consumption matrix that considers 5 levels of consumption and 6 levels of land use. The consumption levels include food, shelter, transportation, consumer goods, and services. The land use levels include energy land, built-up land, fishing grounds, cropland, grazing land, and forest land. The aim is to calculate all the land allocated for the production and maintenance of all goods and services consumed in a particular community. (Donald and Patterson, 2003:3)
For the first time in Iran, the ecological footprint was estimated in the Elahieh district of Tehran. In that study, the amount of produced CO2 was calculated for each consumption level. According to Wackernagel’s law, which states that a hectare of land absorbs 1.8 tons of carbon, the amount of produced CO2 was converted to physical area (hectares). Considering the consumption of electricity, natural gas, water, transportation, waste, and food, 6.33 hectares land was calculated per citizen in the Elahieh district in 2004 (Samadpour and Faryadi,