Special Column:Celebration of the 70th Anniversary of IGSNRR, CAS

The Calculation of Household Ecological Footprint of the Urban Residents Grouped by Income in Gansu

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  • 1. College of Geography and Environmental Science,Northwest Normal University,Lanzhou 730070,China;
    2. Laboratory of Watershed Hydrology and Ecology,Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institate,CAS,Lanzhou 730000,China

Received date: 2006-04-11

  Revised date: 2006-01-16

  Online published: 2006-06-25

Abstract

Ecological Footprint is a new tool used to measure the sustainable development of environment.The Ecological Footprint,according to its concept,analyses the impacts of the people on environment and sustainable development by transferring the impacts caused by people through what they have consumed in a period(usually one year).Household consumption,behavior of the member of a household to sustain the daily life,influencing by the household income is more common to us.Here we can also use the Ecological Footprint to analyses the impact of the household consumption on the environment.This paper not only calculates the Household Ecological Footprint(HEF) of urban residents grouped by income in Gansu in 2002,but also analyses the relationship between dominated income and HEF.As we know,the income of a household,actually the dominated income,predominates the consumption level and style,and then causes the different quantities and compositions of HEF.Further,we get the Ecological Footprint Depredation(EFD) which we define as the difference between each colony and HEF of the average dominated income colony and the total EFD which sums up the EFD of each group.We calculate the Ecological Footprint unjust coefficient which imitated the calculation of the Gini factor.The results shows that the HEF for each group is 1.412×106gha(the highest income group),1.131×106gha(high),1.860×106gha(higher),1.793×106gha(moderate),1.536×106gha(lower),0.724×106gha(low),0.578×106gha(the lowest),and the provincial-average is 1.265×106gha.Because of the size variations in each group,the total HEF of each group,as we showed in the text,is not ordered exactly to the per capita HEF.The Ecological Footprint unjust coefficient is 0.24 which shows that the unjust HEF of each group is not obvious.

Cite this article

SHANG Hai-yang, MA Zhong, JIAO Wen-xian, MA Jing . The Calculation of Household Ecological Footprint of the Urban Residents Grouped by Income in Gansu[J]. JOURNAL OF NATURAL RESOURCES, 2006 , 21(3) : 408 -416 . DOI: 10.11849/zrzyxb.2006.03.010

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