The Welsh Assembly Government has chosen to use the ecological footprint as one of five headline measures of progress towards sustainable development in Wales. This can be used to look at how close people in Wales are to living within environmental limits; an underlying principle of environmental sustainability

This report recalculates Wales’ ecological footprint using 2003 data, and also calculates this for the six Spatial Plan areas in Wales, and for each of the 22 local authorities. For the first time, a time series for the Welsh ecological footprint, covering the period 1990-2003, is provided.

The report also illustrates how components of the ecological footprint may change over time, looking at housing, transport and food. The scenarios created provide footprint trajectories from 2001 to 2020. These scenarios are designed to show the footprint reduction potential of:

• Policies in place today


• Policies planned for the near future


• Further policies that could be implemented on a national scale.

Download the working paper (PDF: 4.18MB)