2007 Volume 3 Issue 1 Pages 3-10
The Ecological Footprint (EF) was co-invented by William E. Rees and Mathis Wackernagel of the University of British Columbia, Canada in 1991. In recent years, the Ecological Footprint analysis has been well recognized and applied in the areas of public policy, planning as well as environmental education in various parts of the world, especially in Europe, North America, and southern hemisphere. Some countries, including Japan, are planning to monitor their EF each year, just as they monitor their gross domestic products (GDP). In this paper, I first present an overview, calculation methods, as well as the significance of the EF analysis in the context of sustainable development. Then, I examine some examples of Ecological Footprint applications in the USA, Europe and Australia. In the latter part of this paper, I explore a possible improvement in the calculation methods associated with nuclear power generation. I present an innovative new method of calculating the Ecological Footprint of nuclear power generation in order to fully incorporate its ‘prolonged impact management (PIM)’ costs which continue to incur, for example, in uranium mine sites at least for more than 10,000 years, and in highly radioactive nuclear waste sites for one million years. An EF calculation of the nuclear power generation in Japan was carried out. The tentative results of this case study were astonishing.
