Ecological footprint is technically defined as the amount of land that is needed to support one’s consumption habits. We all know that the Earth has finite resources with her and therefore over-utilisation or over-extraction of these resources can cause damage to the earth and thereby increase the ecological footprint.

Why one needs to take good care of the ecological footprint is because these days the population growth rate has defeated the growth rate of the resources of the earth, thus making it very difficult to have a stable growth and leading to self deterioration of the economy. Many economists and other ecologists like Malthus have proved and came up with these theories regarding the over exploitation of resources by humans. The ecological footprint of a certain environment also depends on the the area covered. Depending on the acres of your land, then resources should be used accordingly, as the resources have to grow on the same very land. Thus apart from human population, the other factor is scarce or unproductive land that causes a major issue.

Over recent years many scientists have come up with some mathematical and statistical tools to calculate the amount of ecological footprint in a certain ecosystem by the means of calculating the amount of land used and the degree of land regeneration in a particular period of time. This calculated ecological footprint tells you the amount of food that is to be produced, the amount of waste that needs to be collected and other such a stuff.

Scientists have always been studying various kinds of matters related to this field and therefore have also done a lot of research into why the earth has had its impact on the environment. What almost all of the scientists agree on is that the earth’s population is too large and therefore too many people using the same resources will lead to the very obvious and normal result of resource depletion which shall further lead to degradation of replenish-able land.

Apart from this the most striking feature is that many economists and ecologists as well as environmentalists have studied and found out that water is an ever more vital component for the sake of the ecosystem and that it is because of the extensive droughts caused by global warming. In this regard many of them have tried to control and find new ways to put more water into the ecosystem such as salt removal from sea waters. After purification water can then be used for various purposes.

Ecological footprint is a very vital issue and needs to be dealt with very carefully. What we need to see is that control of ecological footprints need to be done and if there are ways to educate everyone and make them aware such that they can find their own ecological footprint, environmental degradation might decrease a lot in the future.