The Ecological Footprint as a Sustainability Metric - Implications for Sustainability

This book examines the Ecological Footprint and biocapacity accounting within an applied development content  for Costa Rica. By doing so, it is possible to track changes as well as perhaps link these to overarching global issues, such as trade, globalization, and food security, among other emergent topics based findings stemming from this methodology. Based on a timeseries since 1961, it is possible to track cross-temporal changes of land-type categories (for crop land, grazing land, forest land, fishing ground, built-up land, and carbon) of the Ecological Footprint and biocapacity conveying whether a country is in ecological deficit and what may be contributing to such a trend


Dr. Mary J. Thornbush is presently a researcher of the Ecological Footprint Initiative based in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, Canada. She has over 80 publications in the areas of applied geomorphology and environmental and urban sustainability. Her doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford addressed urban sustainability through a study of air emissions from transport in central Oxford and investigated their impacts on the weathering of its historical limestone buildings. Her relevant publications include a special journal issue on Geography, Urban Geomorphology and Sustainability in Area (2015) as well as books such as Vehicular Air Pollution and Urban Sustainability: An Assessment from Central Oxford, UK (2015, Springer) and a volume on Urban Geomorphology: Landforms and Processes in Cities (2018, Elsevier).