Focus on Environmental Footprint tools for Sustainability: An Overview of Contributions
Environmental footprint estimation aims to address the challenge of using resources efficiently for food and energy production by revealing effective approaches to minimize the negative consequences to human and ecosystem health. Therefore, footprint tools are particularly well-situated for making connections to consumers, which is important because sustainability goals are often dependent on changing consumer behavior. Since the first papers in the early 21st century, the nitrogen (N) footprint concept has been applied to individuals, institutions, communities, and countries. The role of this special issue focus collection of papers is to bring together new findings from related footprint efforts, together with those already developed at the country, campus, and community scale. This focus collection also explores links with other environmental footprints and how applying these footprint tools can help meet community and campus sustainability goals. The twenty-five papers in this collection, published from 2019-2024, illustrate that there has been great progress in the science of calculating footprints of human activities on water use, land use, and element release to the environment. As the science of footprints is building tools and developing quantification frameworks, the current challenge is to get the tools and information into the hands of people, institutions, and other decision-makers to use them. Information transfer entails working together to prioritize and communication pathways for better managing environmental footprints.