Ecological footprint as a tool for local sustainability.

The Ecological Footprint is a synthetic index useful to assess sustainability of anthropic systems. Its operational use, however, has been hampered by some difficulties, especially at a local scale. Being conceived as a measure of the biologically productive area requested to sustain individual consumptions in a human community, it leaves out the impacts associated to economic activities. Accordingly, the index cannot contribute much to define local policies, whose target are economic activities, and only marginally affect citizens' behaviour. Ecological Footprint calculation scheme can be modified to include the depletion of natural capital due to local activities such as industry, agriculture, tertiary sector, transport, waste and water management. We provide here an approach which takes into account these different aspects, while we discuss its application to a municipal area as a case study.