Global Shifts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Requirements for Water and Bio-Productive Land: The Case of Norway

摘要: The use of various “footprints” to quantify environmental pressures has gained increased attention among sustainability researchers in recent years. Inspired by the communicative success of the “Ecological Footprint”(EF) introduced by Rees (Rees and Wackernagel 1996; Rees 1992; Wackernagel and Rees 1996) around two decades ago, the term has been transferred to assessments of humanity’s appropriation of freshwater resources, and more recently to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions1, under the terms “Water Footprint”(WF)(Chapagain and Hoekstra 2004; Hoekstra and Hung 2002) and “Carbon Footprint”(CF)(Hertwich and Peters 2009), respectively.All three footprints are important measures of sustainability. The EF measures appropriation of biologically productive land, while the WF measures consumption of freshwater–perhaps the two most fundamental resources available to us. The CF measures our need for another capacity of the earth, namely that of assimilating greenhouse gases in order to keep their atmospheric concentrations more or less stable, to prevent anthropogenic climate change.