Resource information
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.
