Rethinking environmental stress from the perspective of an integrated environmental footprint: Application in the Beijing industry sector

Individual footprint indicators are limited in that they usually only address one specific environmental aspect. For this reason, assessments involving multiple footprint indicators are preferred. However, the interpretation of a profile of footprint indicators can be difficult as the relative importance of the different footprint results is not readily discerned by decision-makers. In this study, a time series (1997–2012) of carbon, water and land footprints was calculated for industry sectors in the Beijing region using input-output analysis. An integrated environmental footprint (IEF) was subsequently developed using normalization and entropy weighting. The results show that steep increases in environmental footprint have accompanied Beijing's rapid economic development. In 2012, the Primary Industry had the largest IEF (8.32); however, the Secondary Industry had the greatest increase over the study period, from 0.19 to 6.37. For the Primary Industry, the greatest contribution to the IEF came from the land footprint. For the Secondary and Tertiary Industries, the water footprint was most important. Using the IEF, industry sectors with low resource utilization efficiency and high greenhouse gas emissions intensity can be identified. As such, the IEF can help to inform about industry sectors which should be given priority for modernization as well as the particular footprints that require priority attention in each sector. The IEF can also be helpful in identifying industry sectors that could be encouraged to expand within the Beijing region as they are especially efficient in terms of value adding relative to IEF. Other industries, over time, may be better located in other regions that do not face the same environmental pressures as Beijing.