Integrated Sustainability Analysis
@ The University of Sydney

Development of a novel Ecological Footprint for environmental reporting of companies

In July 2003, Sydney Water Corporation, the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales have started work on a 3-year Linkage Project funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC). The goal of this project is to develop an Ecological Footprint method that

1. incorporates all upstream environmental impacts of a company�s operations in terms of a wide range of sustainability indicators, and
2. can be used by any Australian company for their environmental reporting.

In order to appropriately account for all the upstream effects of a corporation, we will construct a generalised Australian Regional Input-Output Model. This task includes:

• generating Regional Input-Output tables for the Australian economy;
• estimating regional land and water disturbances associated with human use as well as with greenhouse gas emissions;
• defining new sustainability indicators to be incorporated into the ecological footprint;
• formulating dispersion and fate models for local ecosystem processes.

The final product will be a comprehensive ecological footprint framework, which can be used to assist decision-making and planning within a corporation, as well as for the communication of environmental performance to industry stakeholders and the general public. This tool will allow:

• identifying the type and location of environmental impacts across Australian regions;
• analysing virtual scenarios to account for changes in technologies and/or business strategies;
• mapping and spatially visualising ecological footprints using GIS data and software.

Industry Partner

This is an ARC-funded Linkage Project between Sydney Water Corporation, the University of Sydney, and the University of New South Wales.

For further information please contact:

Jodie Gonzalez Jennings Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis Sch. of Physics, A28 The University of Sydney NSW 2006 +61 (0)2 9036-9365 [email protected]