C⁵ Example Application

Sustainopolis, the emerging Ecological Footprint of a community

The idea of ecological footprints is a fundamental theory in environmental design. Ecological footprints provide us with an understanding of the impact we have onto our environment. The ecological footprint of a nation is computed through a number of equations relating the consumption of a nation to its resources and ecological capacity. The “Ecological Footprints of Nations” report (Wackernagel et al., 1997) compares the ecological impact of 52 large nations. Reports of this kind represent compiled information resulting from gathering statistical information at the level of entire nations. It is intrinsically hard to understand the causality implied by information at this statistical level or to even differentiate between correlation and causality. As a consequence the numbers presented in these reports reach little personal significance.

A simulation activity can be used to better illustrate relationships between cause and effect and to comprehend the impact we have onto our environment as not just a number of facts but, instead, as an ongoing process in which individuals serve a crucial role. In the Sustainopolis activity learners use their handheld to keep track of their individual footprint (when did they use what kind of means of transportation, how far they traveled). Once sufficient data has been collected a simulation can establish a resource consumption profile and use the profile to predict future consumption. The resulting resource consumption profile can be used as behavior definition of one or more agents plugged into the aggregate simulation running on the simulation server. The relationship between individual behaviors and consequences at the level of an entire community will gradually become apparent. Again, the continuous nature of C⁵ is important; in this case it is used to gather data points regarding consumption. The connection between clients and server is used to aggregate individual profiles into a global simulation unfolding at the level of a community. The connection between the simulation server and the Web can be used to access statistical – or if available – live information relevant to the Ecological Footprint calculation.