On Earth Day, April 22, 2026, the International Ecological Footprint Learning Lab recently hosted a landmark webinar to launch the 2026 edition of the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts. The 2026 launch specifically highlighted how this ecological data connects with global human well-being metrics. The latest release was presented by researchers at York University and the University of Iceland, who co-authored the global dataset for the Footprint Data Foundation. The dataset covers national production, trade, consumption, commodities, and carbon emissions, and can support research on sustainability, planetary boundaries, environmental flows, and relationships between ecological impact and well-being. The research team publishes new editions of these accounts annually, using updated data and methodologies to build extended timelines that now span from 1961 all the way through 2025.
Led by Eric Miller, Director of York's Ecological Footprint Initiative, the presentation gave a comprehensive breakdown of this sixth edition. Co-hosts walked viewers through world results in biocapacity and ecological footprints, explored how specific countries compare, and highlighted several of the thousands of tracked commodities we follow. The account production team of Kiona Lo, Neha Basnet, Bumika Srikanthalingam, Beatrice Foley, Anna Hao Long, Johanna Louise Van Berkum, Petra Toneva, Marina Ermina, and Clara Klinkenberg also detailed critical methodological improvements integrated into this edition, explained how the public can access the data, and discussed how our growing global partnerships are helping support this project.
To give a clearer picture of how these metrics work, the dataset evaluates environmental limits using two primary balances, reporting results in both total global hectares and global hectares per capita. The Ecological Footprint itself is calculated as the sum of six distinct components: cropland, grazing land, fishing grounds, built-up land, forest products, and forest carbon uptake. These components are rigorously tracked on the basis of national production, national imports, national exports, and national consumption, where consumption is calculated as production plus imports minus exports. On the supply side, biocapacity represents the planet's actual biological asset budget, calculated as the sum of five components: cropland, grazing land, fishing grounds, built-up land, and forest biocapacity. By crunching over 91 million rows of data across these categories, the project provides a stark look at the escalating pressure humanity is placing on Earth's ecosystems.
The headline data from the 2026 launch reveal that humanity is still deeply stuck in ecological overshoot. In 2025, the global ecological footprint topped 20 billion global hectares, overshooting the planet’s sustainable biological capacity by more than 70%, meaning we are consuming resources at a rate that would require 1.7 Earths to sustain. While global consumption growth has finally started to flatten out over the last decade, our historical timeline shows that resource demand only seems to drop during massive global disruptions, like the 1970s oil crisis, the 2008 financial collapse, and the COVID-19 lockdowns. This demand is also highly concentrated; just four countries, China, the United States, India, and Russia, are responsible for more than half of the entire world's ecological footprint, while biological supply remains a wildcard of geography, heavily led by Brazil's massive forest assets.
The 2026 edition also breaks new ground by analyzing how environmental impacts are offshored through international supply chains, noting that the share of the world's footprint crossing borders has skyrocketed from 12% in the 1960s to nearly 30% today. By tracking specific commodities, we can see exactly what is moving across these borders. For instance, our cropland data tracks 420 distinct products, revealing that rapeseed has emerged as the dominant global oil crop since 1987. The trade data also highlights massive structural dependencies; in 2025, a striking 80% of countries acted as such, with countries like the UK, France, and Japan importing highly carbon-intensive commodities. As analyst Neha Basnet noted during the launch, “the geography of consumption has changed; a growing share of consumption now depends on the footprint embedded in production outside the consuming countries,” proving that environmental impact has become completely globalized. China, for example, has become a giant net importer of biocapacity to fuel its industrial and food systems. In 2025 alone, China's net imports of soybeans swallowed up 97 million global hectares of cropland abroad, an area equivalent to 26 times the size of Bhutan.
¹York University, ²University of Iceland.
One of the most exciting segments of the launch focused on how researchers can combine our ecological footprint and biocapacity data with other data sets of interest to create meaningful new insights for the world. To demonstrate this, both teams from York University and the University of Iceland paired consumption metrics with human life satisfaction data from the World Happiness Report. The explicit goal of using this data was to better understand the extent to which national trends in ecological footprint actually relate to trends in life satisfaction, or if they are packaging completely independent paths. The results completely challenge the traditional assumption that consuming more resources automatically makes a society happier. This data crossover revealed that countries with a higher per capita footprint are not necessarily the happiest. While high-footprint nations like Canada averaged a massive 6.6 global hectares per person in 2025 but lagged at 25th in happiness, countries like Costa Rica achieved incredible life satisfaction scores with an ecological footprint 2.5 times smaller than ours. Moving forward, the International Ecological Footprint Learning Lab team is actively working on sharpening these accounts, inviting researchers and organizations everywhere to download open-access datasets and collaborate with the learning lab.
Release Notes: National Ecological Footprint & Biocapacity Accounts 2026
YFile News: Global consumption exceeds Earth’s limits, York researchers find