An area roughly equivalent to that of West Virginia, Delaware, and Rhode Island combined is needed to support the annual consumption of food, energy, goods, and services by Baltimore City residents, according to a new Goucher College study.
Researchers tracked consumption patterns, production levels, and trade information for the city of Baltimore in 2008, the most recent year for which information was available, and estimated the area needed to produce the food and materials that Baltimore citizens consume and to absorb the waste that they create. The results show that to sustain itself, the city needs a footprint of about 27,000 square miles—more than 300 times the actual area of the city.
“We were surprised to discover that the average person in Baltimore needs a 15 percent larger footprint than that of the average American,” said Germán Mora, director of the Environmental Studies Program at Goucher College and lead author of the study. “However, it is not as high as the footprints of other American cities,” he added.
The study, released today, finds that gasoline consumption provides the largest footprint in Baltimore, followed by electricity use in industrial and residential sectors. These results add important information to current city efforts to curb environmental impacts, highlighting the need to decrease private car use and to save energy in the city.
“If every person in the world were to consume at the same level as the average Baltimore resident, we would need four planet Earths,” said Mora. “The good news is that city leaders have embarked on a plan to make the city more sustainable, and these efforts, combined with new regulations at the state and federal level, could decrease the city’s footprint by 20 percent over the next decade.”