"Global hectares" refer to the measurement of a piece of land's productivity and resources in relation to the world as a whole. It helps us understand and compare how much land is required to produce or sustain certain activities or lifestyles worldwide.
Full definition
Both measures are expressed
in global hectares — globally comparable, standardized hectares with world average productivity.
To do this, we subtracted a country's ecological footprint (how much it takes from the environment) from its biocapacity (how much it puts back into the environment) to find its net biocapacity in
global hectares per person.
Studies that are compliant with current Ecological Footprint Standards
use global hectares as a measurement unit.
All of these materials and wastes are then individually translated into an equivalent number
of global hectares.
The Ecological Footprint is expressed
in global hectares, or in global acres for the US calculator.
With humanity's ecological footprint of 2.7
global hectares (gha) per person means to say that to sustain the current population on Earth of 7 billion people would take 18.9 billion gha (2.7 gha x 7 billion people) which is higher than the 13.4 billion global hectares (gha) of biologically productive land and water on Earth, a fact that indicates that already exceeded the regenerative capacity of the planet in the average level of current world consumption.
The bottom 10 countries, on the other hand, need less than one
global hectare per person.
Canada is the most environmentally friendly major economy and tops the list with 7.42
global hectares per person of surplus.
Both ecological footprint and biocapacity are measured in a common unit,
global hectares.
A global hectare is the average amount of resources a hectare (roughly two and a half acres) of productive land produces.
Luxembourg, a micronation neighboring Germany, ranks number one with an 11.51
global hectare per person deficit.
With an Ecological Footprint of 5.8
global hectares (gha) per person, the people of North Rhine - Westphalia demand on average about 9 percent more from nature than the German citizen, according to the report.
(
A global hectare is a hectare of global average productivity.)
The sum of
the global hectares needed to support the resource consumption and waste generation of the person gives that person's total Ecological Footprint.
While India as a whole demands a significant percent of the world's biocapacity, its per - capita Ecological Footprint, 0.8
global hectares, is smaller than that in many other countries, and well below the world average of 2.2 global hectares.
In Ecological Footprint accounts, the «carbon Footprint» measures the amount of biological capacity, in
global hectares, demanded by human emissions of fossil carbon dioxide.
Global hectares are hectares with world - average productivity for all productive land and water areas in a given year.
The number of hectares that result from this calculation are then converted to
global hectares using yield and equivalence factors.
On the Conversion between local and
global hectares in Ecological Footprint analysis.
Biocapacity and footprint of consumption are both converted into an abstract land unit (
global hectares or gha), representing the bioproductivity of a world - averaged hectare [15], [16].
It is measured in
global hectares (a hectare is about thesize of a soccer field).