In fact, only in ten out of the 52 countries, the average citizen uses less than what is available on a per capita basis world-wide. In other words, if all people of the world adapted the lifestyle of the first 42 countries, there would simply not be enough ecological capacity to support them sustainably. We could say that the ecological footprint shows people s contribution to global ecological decline. Ecological deficits . The ecological footprint measures how much ecological capacity we occupy.
Some countries claim more ecological capacity than there is within their boundaries.
This means that they run an ecological deficit. Often, however, the remaining capacity is used for producing export goods rather than keeping it as a reserve. If you want to know a nation s total ecological footprint, multiply the per capita data by the country s population. This study covers 4,701,324,000 people out of 5,892,480,000. Ecological footprint ranking of nations.