Ecological footprint time series of Austria, the Philippines, and South Korea for 1961–1999: comparing the conventional approach to an ‘actual land area’ approach

This paper presents methodological advances for calculating Ecological Footprints in time series, and applies them to Austria, the Philippines, and South Korea for the time period from 1961 to 1999. Two different methodological approaches are taken: (1) The latest evolution of the conventional Ecological Footprint method expressed in ‘global hectares’, or normalized hectares with global average bioproductivity; (2) an ‘actual land-use’ approach that calculates the physical area occupied for each country's socio-economic metabolism. The national assessments presented in this paper apply dynamic equivalence and yield factors, which are recalculated for each year. The paper also proposes new methods to deal with grassland yields and discusses problems in defining bioproductive area. The results, reflecting consumption figures, show that the rapid industrialization in South Korea resulted in a steep increase in its Ecological Footprint, whereas Austria's Footprint, which was already large in 1961, grew only slowly throughout the analyzed period. The paper also presents a sectoral Ecological Footprint analysis that compares human demand on forests in the Philippines to its export of forest products. Following a discussion of these challenges, this paper proceeds to showcase time series for Austria, the Philippines, and South Korea both to compare the Footprint analysis results to those of previous methods and to illustrate its analytical capacity.