Ecuador has become the first country to set a concrete
Ecological Footprint target. The country has included the goal
in its National Plan that, by 2013, its Ecological Footprint
will be within its biocapacity, a trend that it will maintain
going forward. “Ecuador wants to be a leading country [in]
officially using the Ecological Footprint as a resource
accounting tool for policy and decision-making,” Ecuador
Environment Advisor Dania Quirola Suárez said in a roundtable
side-event with Global Footprint Network at the Copenhagen
climate talks. In the past five decades, Ecuador has seen a vast
ecological surplus evaporate. In 1961, the country had
biocapacity more than four times greater than its Ecological
Footprint; today, however, its Ecological Footprint is very
close to its biocapacity and would quickly surpass it if current
trends continued. While the average Ecological Footprint per
person has remained relatively constant, the amount of
biocapacity per person has declined as population has grown—a
trend