Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts for Rural Communities in Ontario

The purpose of this research partnership, with the Ecological Footprint Institute at York University and the Rural Ontario Institute, was to conduct down-scaled community level Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity accounts (EFBAs) for communities in Ontario. Eight community EFBAs were created as a proof-of-concept design of the accounts, this design was later applied to all communities in Ontario. A top-down methodology was applied, by downscaling Ontario’s Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity and applying data to create scaling metrics. Data sources utilized for the EFBAs, included Statistics Canada, Southern Ontario Land Resource Information System (SOLRIS) 3.0, and Ontario Land Cover Compilation (OLCC) v.2.0. The Statistics Canada data was applied to the Ontario Consumption Land-Use Matrix (CLUM) to scale down the Ontario CLUM data to the community level. SOLRIS and OLCC data was used to identify the area for various land classifications and the Ontario Ecological Footprint report was used to match biocapacity classifications to these land classifications. The resulting EFBAs provided environmental data that will be used by municipal stakeholders to inform decision-making on achieving climate and net-zero goals. This project represents the first-time EFBAs have been created for rural Ontario and presents new data and methodologies to expand the planetary accounting field.