Sustainable Colombia : A Comprehensive Colombian Footprint Review

Abstract

During the past several months, the Ministry of Environment, Housing and Territorial Development of Colombia has been researching potential indicators that would be useful to assess and possibly adopt among which included the ecological footprint. This work was commissioned in order to provide the Ministry with a deeper understanding of the ecological footprint and to train a number of its staff on the scope of the footprint in order to support internal evaluations. As part of this exploratory phase, global footprint network held an ecological footprint training workshop in Bogota, Colombia, from May 21 to June 2, 2010, for an audience mostly comprised of Ministry officials, staff, and related institutions. In addition, global footprint network conducted a more in-depth analysis of Colombia's ecological footprint to determine if there is existing in-country data that is more accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date than the data reported to the United Nations (which is used for current Footprint calculations). This process will create a more refined calculation and help identify areas of improvement for data collection. A second focus of the work was having an initial understanding of how the ecological footprint of Colombia might be used in the future to support decision making. For this, we explored two main areas: how the ecological footprint of Colombia plays out across its sectors, and the linkages between biodiversity and the ecological footprint. At the time of writing this report, global footprint network is still attempting to obtain the necessary data (input-output tables) that will enable such a sectoral view, and is assessing the availability of data for a more 'quality-quantitative' economic linkage assessment between the ecological footprint and biodiversity.