Ecological Footprint of Malaysia: Potential Methods and Data Availability (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Ecological footprint (EF] can be defined as the total land and water area required to support a population with a specific lifestyle and given technology with all necessary natural resources and to absorb all wastes and emissions for an indefinite length of time (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996). Many countries, regions, cities and organisations have already employed the EF to assess how far they are living within the carrying capacity of the planet. EF approach applied to a wide variety of levels and issues such as at the national level (Wiedmann et al., 2006; Haberl et al., 2001; Lenzen and Murray, 2001; Wackernagel et al., 1999; Bicknell et al., 1998; van Vuuren and Smeets, 2000; Hubacek and Sun, 2001|, at the subnational level (Hubacek and Sun, 2001; Kissinger et al., 2007; Yue et al., 2006: McDonald and Patterson, 2004), as well as at the local level (Collins et al., 2005; Barrett el at., 2006; Barrett et al., 2004). Moreover, researchers have found the EF concept to be useful when examining the environmental impact from a particular type of activity such as commuting (Muiiiz and Galindo, 2005), tourism (Gossling et al., 2002; Patterson et al., 2007), diet (White, 2000), agriculture (Hornborg, 2006; Ferng, 2005), water use (Jenerette et al.. 2006a, 2006b), spending options (Lenzen and Dey, 2002), trade activities (Ferguson et al., 2004; Hubacek and Giljum, 2003) and land use (Lenzen and Murray, 2001; Hubacek and Sun, 2001). In Malaysia, there is very limited study on EF analysis. The role of this paper therefore is to critically discuss the potential of EF analysis at the different levels (national, state and local) in Malaysia incorporating the existing EF calculations as well as major data requirements.