The application of the ecological footprint in two Irish urban areas: Limerick and Belfast

The ecological footprint is now a widely accepted indicator of sustainable<br/>development. Footprinting translates resource consumption into the land area<br/>required to sustain it, and allows for an average per capita footprint for a region<br/>or nation to be compared with the global average. This paper reports on a project<br/>in which footprints were calculated for two Irish cities, namely Belfast in<br/>Northern Ireland and Limerick in the Republic of Ireland for the year 2001. As<br/>is frequently the case at sub-national scale, data quality and availability were<br/>often problematic, and in general data gaps were filled by means of population<br/>proxies or national averages. A range of methods was applied to convert<br/>resource flows to land areas. Both footprints suggest that the lifestyles of citizens<br/>of the cities use several times more land than their global share, as has been<br/>found for other cities.