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Deriving Ontario Municipal-level Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity data

Deriving Ontario Municipal-level Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity data

by Peri Dworatzek, MES, PhD student and Partnership Coordinator for the International Ecological Footprint Learning Lab

Peri Dworatzek

Fall 2024 marked the release of the first Ontario municipal Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity dataset. This data presents a one-year snapshot of local levels of consumption [ecological footprint] and natural resource regeneration [biocapacity]. All the data is publicly available to access, explore, and analyze by using the Rural Ontario Institute Community Wellbeing Dashboard or for download in an Excel spreadsheet.

In 2022, the Rural Ontario Institute (ROI) hired former MES student now current ES PhD student, Peri Dworatzek, as a data analyst to work on generating environmental data for Ontario municipalities. This was aiming to fill a gap as there was limited data on environmental impacts for every municipality in Ontario, even from Statistics Canada. Peri’s experience as a data analyst for the Ecological Footprint Initiative, knowledge of ecological economics, and as a planning student garnered a perfect fit for generating local level data accounts for Ontario communities. Ecological footprint and biocapacity data fills this data gap because it provides economic consumption data in relation to environmental data to understand environmental and sustainability impacts.  

Ecological footprint and biocapacity are sustainability indicators measuring humanity’s impact on the biosphere. Ecological footprint measures the amount of consumption for a given area and year, while biocapacity measures the regenerative capacity of the Earth’s lands and waters in a given area and year. Ecological footprint and biocapacity are measured using a metric called ‘global hectares’, this applies the global average amount of production so that fair comparisons can be made, even between places that are very different in size or in different years. The most prominent example of this data is the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts that are released each year for all countries around the world. To generate these municipal-level accounts, the national level data for Canada was downscaled by applying Statistics Canada data through scaling coefficients. Additionally, geographic data from Ontario GeoHub was used along with parameters from the Ontario Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Report.

For each municipality, the ecological footprint and biocapacity data can be broken down into components: cropland, grazing land, fishing grounds, forest land, built-up land, forest carbon-uptake, and wetlands. Additionally, the household ecological footprint data can be disaggregated into consumption categories: personal transportation, housing, food, goods, and services. Providing the data broken up into these categories is important to be able to narrow the focus to understand where consumption is trending higher.

The results of the municipal level data show diverse lifestyles and ecosystems across the province of Ontario. The highest ecological footprint for a municipality is 12 global hectares per capita (gha/capita) while the lowest is 0.1 gha/capita. Moreover, biocapacity has an even greater range from the highest biocapacity at 10,038 gha/capita to the lowest being 0.1 gha/capita for the City of Toronto.

Data was generated for all 577 municipalities in Ontario, although 23 municipalities were missing data from Statistics Canada, resulting in released ecological footprint data for 554 municipalities and biocapacity data for 577 municipalities. Ontario municipalities have been broken up into three categories, urban, rural, and Indigenous communities. The ROI has not included individual Indigenous community data on the dashboard to respect Indigenous data sovereignty, although it has been aggregated for all Indigenous communities for the community total that is then included in the Ontario aggregation. The ROI is undertaking more work to engage Indigenous communities with the Community Wellbeing Project and data sovereignty.

Even among rural and urban municipalities there are vast differences in the results. Rural municipalities show a greater range in ecological footprint compared to urban municipalities, potentially highlighting a greater variety of lifestyles and consumption choices. Among urban municipalities there is a smaller range in ecological footprint, however it still varies by five gha/capita. Interestingly, urban municipalities have a higher average ecological footprint than rural municipalities. This was slightly surprising when generating the data; however, when examining the results it became clear that a significant factor for the carbon component of the ecological footprint, personal transportation, is somewhat similar between urban and rural municipalities in Ontario. In Ontario, 83.6% of all people commute to work using a vehicle, and 76% of all people commute as a driver of their personal vehicle. Breaking this up by urban and rural communities, the story is similar. In urban municipalities, 81% of all people commute to work using a vehicle and in rural municipalities it is 91%.

Another important factor in determining ecological footprint that impacts all the components is dollars spent. A limitation of this research was the lack of available expenditure data for all municipalities across the province. As a result, after-tax income data was resorted to as an indicator for consumption. In the future, this data can be improved upon by incorporating expenditure data if it becomes available. As a result of the income data, which was higher on average for urban municipalities than rural municipalities it was a factor leading to a slightly higher average ecological footprint for urban municipalities.

There is also vast differences in biocapacity among different communities. Urban communities tended to have lower levels of biocapacity, although because of how urban communities are classified it resulted in some urban communities having significant amounts of cropland. Cropland in Ontario has a higher global average productivity resulting in increased levels of biocapacity. While much of northern Ontario is covered with forested area and wetlands this resulted in rural communities having higher amounts of forest land and wetlands biocapacity.

This differences in consumption and ecosystems across the province of Ontario highlight the importance of having local level data. Local level consumption data provides information to understand where changes need to be made, in the context that they will be particular to each community because of differences in lifestyles. Local level biocapacity data provides information on what areas should continue to be protected and restored and which ought to be. Although, it is easy to compare the ecological footprint of a community to the biocapacity of a community, this is not a full and accurate assessment of sustainability. Urban areas will not have enough biocapacity to sustain their consumption while rural areas tend to have more biocapacity than ecological footprint. This research in no way implies that urban areas should be self-sufficient, in fact that would often be very unlikely. Rather, it is important to understand that urban areas rely on the biocapacity of non-urban communities and all the more reason to support conserving biocapacity in other places.

The release of this data was accompanied with a methodological report and a results report. Additionally, an academic paper is currently under review. This research was supported by the Ecological Footprint Initiative, the Rural Ontario Institute, the YorkU Geomatics and Climate Change Research CLUSTER, and the International Ecological Footprint Learning Lab. If you have any questions about the data or the results, please contact Peri Dworatzek, dworatzp@yorku.ca.

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