Partners’messages
PARTNERS’MESSAGES WWF Brasil Situated on the edge of the Pantanal, one of Brazil’s most important biomes, Campo Grande is a planned city. However like most Brazilian cities it too faces the dilemma of how to keep growing but on a more sustainable footing, while at the same time providing better living conditions for its inhabitants without putting even more pressure on already scarce natural resources. By taking up the challenge of this pioneering work to measure its own ecological footprint alongside WWF-Brasil, the city has now acquired a precious tool that will help it to overcome that challenge. Calculating the Ecological Footprint is just the first step of the work and serves as the starting point. It reveals where the greatest pressures on renewable natural resources lie, making it possible to determine the direction of possible actions to be undertaken in the sphere of public policies and on the part of companies and the citizens of Campo Grande in a bid to reduce those pressures. ecosSISTEMAS The Planet Earth has a limited capacity to provide human society with all the resources it needs for the survival and prosperity of the species. Because of its ignorance of ecological limitations, humanity has been making use of a kind of planetary ‘overdraft’ and the interest on it is gradually consuming the maintenance capacity of the ecosystems that support life on Earth. The Campo Grande Ecological Footprint study has clearly revealed the size of that interest payment, in other words the effective availability of natural resources in the Campo Grande region, and the actual demand being made on them to meet the populations needs. What is more important, this work indicates ways in which public administration can develop the municipality within the limits of nature; an ability that is more than necessary for any public administration being conducted in the 21st century. The moment could not be more propitious.
Campo Grande Ecological Footprint 2012 p.
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