Pegada ecológica como um indicador de sustentabilidade nos limites da expansão urbana de Londrina - Paraná

Abstract

In recent times, the concern of society with environmental issues has been growing enough, mainly due to the fact that a great part of the available natural resources are endurable. Thus, methods that determine the sustainability of systems, such as the methodology known as the Ecological Footprint, become important and of growing use. The Ecological Footprint can be defined as an instrument of measurement of flows, materials and energy that run through a system, which are then transformed into a unit of land area, which corresponds to the area of nature that supports this system. With this, the present study aimed to investigate the Ecological Footprint of the city of Londrina, seeking to evaluate if the municipality develops and maintains itself in a sustainable way. Preprocessing and processing of high-resolution Rapid Eye satellite images were performed along with some Geoprocessing software, in order to stablish the parameters necessary for the determination of this index. The parameters used for the elaboration of the Ecological Footprint were: built/waterproofed area, undergrowth, tree vegetation, exposed soil, income, waste collection, areas of illegal occupation and hydrography. The same parameters were used to calculate the total Ecological Footprint, with the exception of income, since it is not possible to measure it in an area unit. Comparing with the Ecological Footprint evaluated in 2004, it was noticed that there was a large increase of area considered with High Ecological Footprint. On the other hand, the areas corresponding to the Medium and Lower Footprint, have a decrease in size, indicating a worsening of the sustainability index of the city of Londrina.