Profligacy, greed or simply don't care?

Lenzen's finding, that increasing income drives a higher ecological footprint, leads logically to the conclusion that the more affluent residents of the region have the largest environmental impact. This, however, requires qualification.

It is the products and services that people buy, rather than simple affluence estimated as their financial worth, that influence impact and make for a larger environmental footprint. While they have the same types of household appliances that the lower income demographic might own, higher income groups also spend their money on those products that contribute less to the region's ecological footprint, products such as books, theatre tickets and eating out.

This discretionary spending limits income and wealth, by themselves, as reliable indicators of ecological footprint. It brings into question the idea of income redistribution through increased taxes on higher income earners as a means of reducing their impact.

Impact follows affluence gradient

Just how much land-equivalence do Eastern Suburbs residents require to support their lifestyles? Despite his reservations about a direct link between income and impact, Lenzen's research discloses that there does exist an overall relationship between them:

• the ecological footprint of residents of the affluent local government area of Woolahra, abutting Sydney Harbour, is 8.31 hectares per capita, up from 8.12ha in 1996;
• citizens of Waverly municipality, immediately to the south of Woolahra, need 7.97ha each to support their lifestyle, compared to 7.53ha in 1996; and
• Randwick residents each require a total of 6.95ha, compared to 6.52ha in 1996.

It is an upward trend in all cases, with Woolahra leading the three local government areas, and it generally follows the north to south socioeconomic gradient through the region.

Lenzen compared the Eastern Suburbs' ecological footprint to that of the Inner Sydney area - the region surrounding Sydney CBD. For the same period, Inner Sydney residents needed 8.52ha to support their lifestyles, an increase from 7.66ha in 1996 and greater that of the most affluent part of the Eastern Suburbs. This he puts down to demographic changes in the region, particularly the increase in the number of single person households, each of which buys its own range of products such as white goods. Lacking is the sharing that occurs in larger households.

The affluent inner suburbs?

Inner Sydney is a region of medium to higher density dwellings, a great many dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In those times it was a socially mixed region of middle and working class residents, each in their own areas, plus a few who had found wealth on the goldfields.

Their mansions, often subdivided into apartments today, are found in pockets throughout the area. Social change came with the 1970s and the start of “gentrification”, a term that carried a certain opprobrium but which was, in reality, symptomatic of Australia's changing economy. Now, those little working class terraces and the larger homes of the middle class are occupied by Sydney's service sector workers.

It is true that the construction and fitting out of the new apartment buildings with white goods and other products, apartments that have been built in the region over the past 20 years or so, produces a spike on the ecological footprint graph. There are, however, factors in medium density residential development that tend to lower impact and that, over time, can more than compensate for the initial peak. This includes living close to public transport and shopping venues, and the consequent lower reliance on private vehicles.

Local government response

Speakers at the Randwick City Council-UNSW event (the council maintains a formal partnership with UNSW) where Lenzen presented his research praised council for its initiatives in reducing the ecological footprint of its own operations and in educating its citizens in ways to reduce theirs. Council raises funds of more than $2 million a year through an environmental levy on ratepayers and spends the money on improving water conservation and reuse, energy conservation, waste reduction, improving remnant bushland and other measures. Importantly, council is upgrading its own infrastructure to comply with environmental standards.

Council workshops attract people from beyond the municipality. This lends council’s community education program a regional, not just local importance. It reinforces the reality that Eastern Suburbs citizens perceive the coastal strip as a contiguous bio-geographical region rather than as simply an assemblage of local government areas.