Biocapacity

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The measure of how much biological material an ecosystem can generate while absorbing carbon dioxide and waste products
2. The extent to which a biological system can produce renewable resources and maintain ecological balance while managing waste
3. The ability of a natural environment to generate renewable materials and assimilate carbon emissions within a given area

Etymology: "Biocapacity" is a plain compound: "bio-" from Greek "bios" meaning "life", joined to "capacity", which comes from Latin "capacitas", from "capax", "able to hold much", itself from "capere", "to take or hold". Put together, the term means the capacity of living systems to hold and supply what people draw from them. The term is a modern technical coinage, built on the familiar "bio-" prefix that appears in words like "biology" and "biosphere". Its meaning is specific: it measures how much renewable resource a region's ecosystems can produce, such as crops, timber, fish and grazing land, and how much carbon they can absorb, usually expressed in area units. The "capacity" in the word keeps the older sense of containment, so the idea is that a landscape can hold only so much demand before it runs short.

Synonyms: ecological capacity, biological capacity, environmental capacity, sustainability capacity, resource capacity

Antonyms: overshoot, depletion, unsustainability, resource scarcity, ecological deficit