Namib Sand Sea

What is Human Footprint?

The Human Footprint measures the cumulative impact of direct pressures on nature from human activities. Individual pressures were placed within a 0–10 scale and summed, giving a cumulative score of human pressure ranging from 0 to 50. A Human Footprint score below 3 indicates land which is predominantly free of permanent infrastructure, but may hold sparse human populations. A Human Footprint score of 4 is equal to pasture lands, and is a reasonable threshold of when land can be considered “human dominated” and species are likely to be threatened by habitat conversion. A Human Footprint score of 7 is equal to agriculture, above which a landscape will contain multiple pressures, for example agriculture with roads and other associated infrastructure, and is therefore highly modified by humans.

Details about the work are provided in the following paper:

Oscar Venter, Eric W. Sanderson, Ainhoa Magrach, James R. Allan, Jutta Beher, Kendall R. Jones, Hugh P. Possingham, William F. Laurance, Peter Wood, Balázs M. Fekete, Marc A. Levy & James E. M. Watson, 2016. Sixteen years of change in the global terrestrial human footprint and implications for biodiversity conservation. Nature Communications 7:12558. DOI:10.1038/ncomms12558

What does it mean for natural World Heritage sites?

Here we present result for each natural World Heritage site in the paper: Recent increases in human pressure and forest loss threaten many Natural World Heritage Sites. It shows the change of Human Footprint as an indicator of anthropogenic pressure from 1993 to 2009. The map shows the intensity of change in this period, with red pixels suggesting an increase of Human Footprint and blue a decrease.