Wackernagel says sustainability can be measured

Mathis Wackernagel, the Swiss creator of the ecological footprint, says the world must look beyond climate change and carbon emissions to address its wider resource crisis, SRF reports.

On July 30, temperatures in Basel reached 39.7 degrees Celsius, the highest level ever recorded there. The same day marked World Overshoot Day, the date on which humanity had used the resources that Earth can regenerate during the whole of 2026.

Wackernagel described the coincidence as “a poetic and tragic accident”. He developed the ecological footprint concept and is also behind the Overshoot Day calculation.

A measurement based on individual consumption

The ecological footprint compares an individual’s resource consumption with Earth’s capacity to regenerate. It calculates how much biologically productive land is needed to sustain a person’s standard of living indefinitely under current production conditions.

The concept has also faced criticism for simplifying the issue too much and failing to show solutions. Wackernagel said he was familiar with those objections and compared the footprint with gross domestic product, which is also a major simplification but has become an established measure.

He said he would prefer to discontinue the individual footprint calculator, but no better instrument was currently available. He considered it the best tool for educational purposes, while comparisons between countries were also valuable.

Wackernagel developed the footprint before the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit on biodiversity in Rio. The concept helped turn the planet’s abstract limits into something tangible, SRF science editor Katrin Zöfel said.

“Action is needed”

The footprint concept is now known around the world. Wackernagel lives in California and was in Basel, his birthplace, for a sustainability event.

Despite the record heat, he urged people to take a broader view. “It is a major mistake to reduce the entire environmental debate to climate and then to CO2 emissions,” he told SRF.

That narrow focus could lead people to think that the next summer would still be just as hot even if they stopped driving. “That is true, and then we do nothing,” he said.

“There will be more climate change and fewer resources,” Wackernagel said. He described climate change as only a small part of a much larger problem: resource consumption.

The shortage of hay and crops that withered during the summer offered an indication of what this could mean, he said. “In a hotter world, it will become much more difficult to maintain agricultural production.”

Wackernagel said he had experienced the effort involved in producing food during childhood holidays on a farm. If Switzerland were viewed as a farm, the country would currently consume around four times as many resources as it produced itself.

A sustainability pioneer from Basel

Wackernagel was born in Basel in 1962 and studied engineering at ETH Zurich. He completed a doctorate in urban and regional planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 1994. His dissertation led to the ecological footprint concept.

He now chairs the Global Footprint Network, based in Oakland in the United States, and advises governments and organisations. Among other honours, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bern in 2007.

Wackernagel said the generations of parents and grandparents were familiar with the issue because Switzerland had enough food from its own soil for only seven months during the Second World War. People had to rely on gardens and save resources.

A global market failure

Countries such as Switzerland and China now consume several times more resources than they reproduce, Wackernagel said. Uruguay, by contrast, has three times more resources than it consumes.

That showed “a huge market failure in the world”, he said. The situation would eventually correct itself, but it remained unclear whether this would happen through disaster or design: as a collapse of the global economy or through political negotiation.

Wackernagel said discussions about goals too often focused on what people would have to do, allowing them to avoid the issue. “Much more important would be to find out what we want,” he said.

He said people around the world had not understood that the future was much more predictable than they believed.