The global ecological footprint is calculated by assessing the demand placed on Earth's ecosystems by measuring the amount of biologically productive land and sea area required to produce the resources consumed and to absorb the waste generated by a population. It can be expressed as the number of earths a certain way of life would require, if everyone lived the same lifestyle. Earth required is shown in the chart above as a measure of sustainability on the y-axis.

Roughly 60% of the world population lives in countries with an ecological deficit. That is to say that a population’s ecological footprint exceeds the region’s biocapacity. And if we all lived like those countries one world would not be enough to sustain us. 60 countries out of 182 have a way of live the earth could sustain. Almost all the sustainable countries belong to the low or lower-middle income group, none of them is in the high income realm. Only four of the 60 countries have also a high human development. They are: Egypt, Jordan, Moldova, and Tunisia. This is 2.6% of the world's population, that lives a sustainable and good life according to the Human Development Index (HDI).

11 regions or countries had no HDI data available in 2023:

Human Development Index

The HDI, was introduced by the UN in 1990 to provide a more well-rounded evaluation of human development than mere economic statistics did. It measures health, education, and standard of living. Health is assessed by life expectancy at birth. Education by the average number of years of school completed by adults as well as the number of years of school expected to be completed by children. Standard of living is assessed by the gross national income (GNI) per capita. The HDI can provide insights that a single measure cannot. If a country with a high GNI has a lower life expectancy and lower educational attainment than a country with a lower GNI, there is reason to suspect that human well-being higher income country is not sufficiently prioritized.

Ecological Footprint

The ecological footprint measures how much nature we use compared to how much we have. Tracking the biologically productive land and water area required by an individual, population, or activity to produce all the resources it consumes, to house all its infrastructure, and to absorb its waste given current technology. Global Footprint Network annually calculates and publishes countries' ecological footprints on an open data platform. When a population's ecological footprint exceeds its territory's biocapacity, it runs a deficit, balanced either through using biocapacity from elsewhere or local overuse, called 'ecological overshoot'. At the global level, deficit and overshoot are identical due to the absence of interplanetary trade. This accounting method can be applied across scales, from global to product level, with global overshoot serving as an indicator of unsustainability. (EU Commission - Ecological Footprint, 2018)