Does the footprint provide a precise estimate of human impact?
To secure wide public acceptance, footprints do not exaggerate the severity of the ecological situation. Rather, they offer an underestimate of the true human impact on the earth. Still, in spite of their systematic underestimates of the human impact on the planet, the ecological footprint calculations show that humanity uses more than the biosphere can regenerate. Also, in most footprint assessments, we use official data and not because they are the most reliable. This is to illustrate that, once these official statistics are interpreted from an ecological perspective, significant new conclusions emerge. (See also Question 14 on the possibilities for including more impacts into future ecological footprint analyses).
