From Footprint to Handprint
Just under 30 years ago, William Rees introduced the idea of an ecological footprint in a scientific article on the impact of cities on the Earth. Originally, footprint evoked the carrying capacity of the entire planet, and evolved to describe ‘the amount of environment needed to produce the goods and services necessary to support a certain lifestyle’. Every year, the Global Footprint Network publishes our collective, global environmental footprint. Right now, this is 1.6, meaning our ecological overshoot is about 60%. We are generating waste and consuming natural resources (including the atmosphere and the oceans) at such speed that we would need 1.6 earths to sustain our lifestyle. Put another way, what we consume in 1 year, takes the earth 1 year and 8 months to produce. In 2020, a year that saw air-traffic and large parts of industry grind to a halt due to Covid-19, we exceeded earth’s carrying capacity exactly 1 month ago, on August 22.
To put this in perspective, imagine borrowing a $1,000 loan from a bank and — rather than paying it back — every year, you increase your line of credit by 60%! Your debt would very quickly spiral out of control, close to $110,000 in only 10 years. That is the power of exponential growth. Given that we have been, in very real terms, borrowing from the earth since 1970 without paying back our debt, this analogy should give us pause. You can find your particular country’s ecological footprint here.
Now, our ecological footprint consists of several components, including a land footprint and a water footprint, but none is more famous than our carbon footprint. Ironically, it was British Petroleum that popularized the term in 2005. Carbon footprints and their lesser known brethren are now calculated at the individual, company, city, country, and global levels, and firms especially face increasing pressure to get their negative impacts on the planet under control. This is fantastic news, but it is not enough.
Say hello to Handprint. Handprint is the opposite of footprint. While a footprint captures all the damage you do to the planet and its ecosystems, a handprint is a measure of your positive impact. Your handprint describes the trees you plant, the plastic you pull from the seas, habitats you protect, reefs you reconstruct etc. etc…. But, do we really need an addition to our lexicon? I believe so, and here’s why.
First, people and organizations at the vanguard need to leapfrog forward to make real progress towards a sustainable planet. Many multinationals and an increasing number of SMEs have started measuring and reporting their carbon — and in some cases water — footprint. That’s great. What gets measured, gets monitored, and what gets monitored can be improved. But not that footprints are becoming commonplace, we need goals that are more ambitious than neutrality in a losing war, and a language that enables us to speak candidly about what individuals and companies are doing to regenerate, restore, and redevelop earth’s natural systems.
Second, the focus on (carbon) footprinting has created an obsession with offsetting. Offsetting means you buy a carbon credit (like a sin indulgence) that allows you to claim your footprint is actually lower than it is. So companies emiting 1,000 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere can buy an equivalent in carbon credits and claim carbon neutrality. This is a good start and every company should do this, but it is not enough. We need to do more than just offsetting current damages. We need to restore ecosystems, to rebalance our account. This means going beyond the footprint, to focusing on the handprint.
Third, the goal of an ecological footprint is minimization. The most sustainable companies will become carbon neutral, which means their net emissions ( footprint) is zero. But “going to zero” is an terribly uninspiring goal, around which you cannot engage a global population. Nobody ever gets excited about neutrality (with the exception perhaps of net neutrality). As Desmond Tutu said, “he who stays neutral in the face of adversity sides with the oppressor.” In the face of real, existential threat to human societies and a vast majority of other living creatures on Earth, we need to be able to set goals that are more aspirational than “do no harm”. We need healers. A handprint can grow as much as you want. Its goal is abundance, infinity. Now that is aspirational.
Finally, in the footprinting world, there is a lot of language confusion used to describe the move beyond carbon neutrality. Scientists talk of “becoming carbon negative” (meaning you draw more carbon from the air than you emit), while the popular press calls the exact same thing “becoming carbon positive”, (based on a positive contribution to the planet. This is like Sasha Baron Cohen declaring positive and negative will be replaced by aladeen. Are we all becoming carbon aladeen? The oil baron and the solar developer, the forester and the shipper? Confusion past neutral stymies understanding, but a bigger Handprint means you have done more good things. It is a simpler, more engaging concept.
While some may claim we do not need the concept of an environmental handprint, I cannot agree. Yes, in theory, businesses could redesign industrial processes so they only benefit the planet, but this has been slow to emerge. While we wait for a circular economy, we need a simple goal, an objective that is so easy to grasp that every firm and every person can take it and run with it, a concept that inspires virtuous, viral growth of action. It’s time to start growing our Handprint.
