A Modified Method To Emergetic Ecological Footprint And Its Application

The ecological footprint created by Wackernagel and Rees is a largely heuristic tool for evaluating the sustainability of a system and has been applied widely in economic and ecological researches. The emergetic ecological footprint indicator which created by Zhao et al. was based on emergy analysis created by Odum H.T. through combining emergy analysis into ecological footprint. It was used for evaluating sustainability of an ecosystem through energy flow. The aim of this paper is to show a modified form of emergetic ecological footprint by using yields of regional biological resources to substitute biological resources consumptions. To demonstrate the mechanics of this new method, we compared our calculation with the calculations of conventional ecological footprint and emergetic ecological footprint of a regional case. We select Dalian city of Liaoning province in northeast China, as an example for application of our study, and calculate ecological footprint, ecological carrying capacity, ecological overshoot, ecological footprint intensity index and ecological overshoot index. In this case the same conclusions were drawn using all methods: Dalian city runs an ecological overshoot.