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Abstract
As we face multiple environmental crises (e.g. climate change, nutrient pollution, freshwater scarcity), there is often a disconnect between an entity’s activities and the pollution resulting from that activity. Footprint tools help address this disconnect. They are effective in educating people, institutions and communities on how their resource use results in environmental pollution and what we can do to moderate that pollution. These tools connect an entity’s activities with the associated pollution. Footprint tools are also constantly evolving. As we better understand how to best estimate emissions—especially from sources further removed like those from the supply chain—the guidance and methods for calculating footprints is changing and improving. This paper reviews footprint tools for people, institutions and communities, with a focus on nitrogen footprint tools (NFTs). It also gives examples of how these tools have been applied to achieve pollution reductions. It concludes with an assessment of how nitrogen and multi-element footprint tools fit into the overall topic of environmental management and discusses their benefits and limitations.
Department
Sustainability Institute
Publication Date
9-17-2024
Journal Title
Environmental Research Letters
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
James N Galloway et al 2024 Environ. Res. Lett. 19 103003 DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/ad677c
Rights
© 2024 The Author(s).
Comments
This is an open access article published by IOP Publishing in Environmental Research Letters in 2024, available online: https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad677c