Resource Footprints are Good Proxies of Environmental Damage

Environmental
footprints are increasingly used to quantify and
compare environmental impacts of for example products, technologies,
households, or nations. This has resulted in a multitude of footprint
indicators, ranging from relatively simple measures of resource use
(water, energy, materials) to integrated measures of eventual damage
(for example, extinction of species). Yet, the possible redundancies
among these different footprints have not yet been quantified. This
paper analyzes the relationships between two comprehensive damage
footprints and four resource footprints associated with 976 products.
The resource footprints accounted for >90% of the variation in
the
damage footprints. Human health damage was primarily associated with
the energy footprint, via emissions resulting from fossil fuel combustion.
Biodiversity damage was mainly related to the energy and land footprints,
the latter being mainly determined by agriculture and forestry. Our
results indicate that relatively simple resource footprints are highly
representative of damage to human health and biodiversity.