A paper by Charles Darwin University’s School for Environmental Research is helping to benchmark the environmental impact of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the Northern Territory.
Director of the School for Environmental Research, Professor Stephen Garnett, and Research Associate, Richard Wood, recently analysed the ecological footprint of people in the NT and how this is affected by remoteness and indigineity.
Professor Garnett said the study showed that the average Territorian needed 8.3 hectares of land to support themselves. This compares to 6.5 hectares for the average Australian and just 2.2 ha globally.
“The ecological footprint is a convenient way to measure the effects of our day to day consumption,” he said. “The analysis uses huge national and global databases to show how much land is needed to produce, say, a litre of milk or a rod of steel.”
“The ecological footprint brings home locally responsibility for global impact in a way that is less easily contested than greenhouse gas production,” he said. “In a resource-based economy much of the energy use is undertaken for consumers elsewhere."
Professor Garnett says the analysis shows that 54% of the footprint is imposed by non-Indigenous people from Darwin although they make up only 48% of the population.
“You might think that people living in remote areas would use more given all the travelling they have to do,” Professor Garnett said, “Instead it is we city people. We live on small blocks but import all we need from elsewhere round the globe.”
There was also a big difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, wherever they live.
“The people with the smallest footprint are Indigenous people living in remote areas,” said Professor Garnett, “While this is partly because they are too poor to consume as much as city people, it is also because they are sustained by the land where they live.”
The study also showed which components of consumption had the biggest impact. For remote Indigenous people, government services account for half the impact, compared to 25% in the city. For the whole of the NT, transport, construction and retail trade are the top drivers.
“This study shows that local production of food and services would have a big impact in reducing our ecological footprint,” says Professor Garnett, “Also that much of the burden falls on city people to reduce consumption of goods with big footprints.”