(Note 1) Monitoring systems, safeguarding systems, prevention systems and mapping systems form the tight network that makes it possible to have an overall picture of Veneto and its territory. However, one important aspect remains to be analysed: what role do the economy and human activity play in this "picture"?
It's interesting to note that the indicators that are normally used to measure the global wealth of a nation or a region, such as GDP, do not take into consideration environmental issues, i.e. they do not worry about measuring how much the development that a given country or region is benefitting from costs in terms of loss of ecological resources. In official statistical surveys, it is still not considered 'normal' to make a relationship between economic development and the degree of environmental conservation. And yet, there is a relationship between economy and ecology. The very words themselves have the same semantic origin: oikos (home) nomos (rules) and oikos (home) logos (concept, science) from Greek, if we look closely, deal with similar spheres. Indeed, we could go as far as to claim that ecology, from a semantic point of view, belongs to a greater order of magnitude than economy. In other words, it is obvious that there is a relationship between economy and ecology: indeed, both disciplines study vital relationships, the former with particular regards to humans, the latter with regards to all living beings, including humans. So, then, how do we relate economic phenomena with ecological phenomena? How can we measure the economic deficit or surplus related to a given degree of development and well-being? An Ecological Footprint is the answer to these questions as it measures the "portion of a territory" (be it land or water) that a population needs to produce all of the resources it consumes and absorb the waste created in a sustainable way.
William Rees, an ecologist at the British Columbia University, was the first to define an "Ecological Footprint" during the 1990s. Subsequently, his student and collaborator Mathis Wackernagel, studied the phenomena more thoroughly and offered applications that could be disseminated on an international level.
In order to determine the Ecological Footprint of a given region, scholars must consider the resources available to a given population in the territory that they occupy (this index is called Biocapacity). Both indices (Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity) are measured in equivalent global hectares per person per year, which, subsequently, for simplicity's sake are called hectares (presuming that hectares refer to equivalent global hectares).
The Ecological Footprint of any population (including individual level, urban level, regional level or national level) is the sum of the amount of biologically productive land and sea area needed to regenerate the resources a human population consumes and to absorb and render harmless the corresponding waste. The Ecological Footprint of a given territory is added (this value is negative as it refers to the impact and index of resource consumption) to Biocapacity, and the resulting balance that comes from it may be positive (ecological surplus) or negative (Ecological Deficit). The Ecological Footprints of some nations, updated in 2005, are reported in (Table 17.7.1).
Establishing the Ecological Footprint makes it possible to understand how much a nation, region, or even single resident, is sustainable, whether the footprint is positive (i.e. there is a surplus of environmental resources compared to consumption) or unsustainable, in which case the ecological balance is negative (i.e. there is a deficit of environmental resources compared to consumption).
In order to calculate the Ecological Footprint of a given area, many different sources of information are required, including consumption of resources and goods, the technological and energy efficiency of industrial processes, and agricultural productivity. Whereas these data are often available at a national level, the same is not true at a regional and local level. This means that in order to determine the Ecological Footprint on a regional and local level (provincial and/or municipal), it is necessary to turn to hypotheses and a certain degree of approximation.
Within the context of the Regional Territorial Coordination Plan (Piano Territoriale Regionale di Coordinamento, or PTRC) and the Strategic Environmental Evaluation (Valutazione Ambientale Strategica, or VAS), a study was carried out to calculate the Ecological Footprint of the Veneto Region, as well as the variations that affect the indicator as scenarios change. The indicator was used both during the stage in which the current situation was defined, as well as during the process of choosing from among the various possible options, thus providing the VAS with a useful tool for measuring the impact of the choices in the various environmental matrices.
When calculating the Ecological Footprint of the Veneto Region, efforts were made to use the most uniform data possible in order to avoid systematic errors in the calculations and to reduce the inevitable approximations to the minimum. The reference year used to calculate this index was 2004; the data mainly come from ISTAT, Italy's national statistics institute, and SISTAR, Veneto's regional statistics system.
The Ecological Footprint is calculated using a model based on types of land that are ecologically productive and necessary in order to provide resources for residents in the region. There are various consumption categories, each of which is subdivided within the land categories needed for production. By summing the surfaces obtained from the various consumption categories, it is possible to obtain the total Ecological Footprint of the Veneto Region.
In addition to calculating the Ecological Footprint, Regione Veneto also carried out a calculation of Biocapacity, which indicates the total extension of the ecological productive territory in the region, i.e. the capacity to produce natural services starting from local ecosystems.
In 2004, the Ecological Footprint of the Veneto Region was 30,234,474.8 hectares per year, equal to 6.43 hectares per capita; the biocapacity was 7,633,742.6 hectares per year, equal to 1.62 hectares per capita. This means that since the human load (Ecological Footprint) is about 4 times greater than the level of sustainability (the Biocapacity of the planet is 1.8 hectares per person), Veneto has a significant level of unsustainability. Indeed, the entire country has an ecological deficit and the regions that have carried out these types of studies (e.g. Emilia Romagna) confirm the trend that is seen in the Veneto region. The Ecological Footprint can also be interpreted via consumption or land categories, grouped together according to the Wackernagel and Rees model (2000) (Table 17.7.2).
An Ecological Footprint can also be interpreted based on types of consumption. The categories that are used are the standard ones of the Ecological Footprint, according to Wackernagel and Rees (2000) (Table 17.7.3).
The values by province with error variability (between the minimum and the average), which is based on the uncertainty of the data (the estimated error is 20%), are reported in (Table 17.7.4) (Note 2).
A summary of the results from the Ecological Footprint analysis begins with the total value of the Ecological Footprint per capita (6.43 hectares eq. per capita) and from the Biocapacity per capita, which, with 1.62 hectares eq. per capita, covers only 25% of the use of natural services used by residents in the region, leaving an ecological deficit of 75%. This piece of data highlights a situation of environmental deficit. In other words, the use of ecological services in the region and its provinces, represented by the Ecological Footprint measurement, proves to be significant and greater than the national average, which already indicates a major use of natural resources. At this point, improving the footprint depends on the possible, and hopeful, collaboration of individual behavior, economic players and political policies.