What is the proper way to use the term Ecological Footprint?
The term Ecological Footprint, capitalized, is a proper name referring to a specific research question: how much of the biological capacity of the planet is required by a given human activity or population? Often, the word ‘footprint’ is used generically to refer to human impact on the planet, or to a different research question. For example, the term ‘carbon footprint’ often refers to the number of tonnes of carbon emitted by a given person or business during a year, or to the tonnes of carbon emitted in the manufacture and transport of a product. There is a carbon component to the Ecological Footprint. It measures the amount of biological capacity, in global hectares, demanded by human emissions of fossil carbon dioxide. The term Ecological Footprint has been deliberately excluded from trademark to encourage its widespread use. Global Footprint Network strives to maintain the value of this term by encouraging our partners and others using the word footprint or Ecological Footprint to
