Supporting National-Level Policies for Sustainable Consumption in Portugal : A Socio-Economic Ecological Footprint Analysis

National level Ecological Footprint studies have highlighted disparities among countries. This assessment has proved essential to accurately assign ecological impacts to specific countries, but it often ignores the heterogeneity within national spaces. Groups within a country engage in different behaviors and consumption patterns, which also have an impact on their Ecological Footprint. Understanding the contribution of each group and decomposing their behavior towards the consumption of distinct products is critical to help environmental organizations and policy makers designing more efficient policies and communication strategies that will change critical patterns of human demand. In this work, an innovative method is used to decompose the Portuguese national Ecological Footprint according to distinct groups in each socio-economic dimension: main sources of income, age, number of members in the household and levels of education of the population. Results highlight how diverse ecological impacts can occur among distinct population groups. The application of this method and the results produced constitute a new possibility to analyze the potential effect of policies that can tackle specific behaviors and anticipate the effectiveness among distinct groups of the population