Ecological Footprint of the City of Reykjavík

With over half the world’s population living in cities, urban sustainability has become pivotal in the global effort for sustainability, reducing resource depletion and mitigating climate change. Ecological footprint (EF) is a widely used indicator for assessing the environmental pressures associated with human consumption. It expresses human demand as bioproductive area requirement comparable to biocapacity (BC). This thesis derives an EF account for Reykjavík, examines how the city’s consumption relates to ecological limits by comparing the EF with Icelandic and global BC benchmarks, and explores how the results can be used to inform policy. Using Iceland’s National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts as a baseline, national EF components were downscaled to Reykjavík with ratios for consumption, income, housing and energy-use related emissions. The results show that Reykjavík’s EF is 9.35 gha/capita (2.85-9.39 across sensitivity cases), dominated by the fishing grounds component at 6.70 gha/capita (72%), followed by forest carbon uptake at 1.05 gha/capita. Cropland, grazing land, forest products and built-up land are individually smaller but together still represent a meaningful share of the city’s demand on BC. A sensitivity case using an alternative fisheries estimate reduces the fishing grounds footprint to 0.20 gha/capita and lowers the total EF to 2.85 gha/capita, with forest carbon uptake then becoming the largest component and road transport as its main driver. Using Iceland’s BC of 13.67 gha/capita as benchmark, Reykjavík’s EF lies within national BC, but against global BC of 1.52 gha/capita, the footprint is many times higher. The analysis shows that greenhouse gas accounting alone cannot capture Reykjavík’s overall ecological demand and that EF-based indicators can support climate and planning efforts as a diagnostic tool rather than a strict target.

Abstract extracted from on the University of Iceland’s institutional repository, where you will also find the full thesis

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