The evaluation of the Ecological Footprint of the Province of Siena (Italy)

The SPIN-ECO Project has analysed the environmental sustainability of the Province of Siena (Italy). A set of different methodologies has been applied to better check the state of the environment. This work discusses the calculation of the Ecological Footprint and the biocapacity, that has enabled us to acquire a deeper understanding of the state of the environment. The Ecological Footprint is an indicator of environmental sustainability, proposed by Wackernagel and Rees in 1996 [l], that evaluates the global surface of productive ecosystems necessary to sustain the consumption of goods and resources and to absorb the emissions made by a population. This indicator provides information on the use and consumption of natural services and can be compared with the measure of local biocapacity, which evaluates the entity of natural services that the local ecosystems are able to produce. Thanks to these two indicators it is possible to make out an ecological balance-sheet for the region and estimate the ecological deficit/surplus. In order to make the analysis more helpful in addressing local policies and actions towards a greater sustainability, the evaluation of the Ecological Footprint and biocapacity has also been applied to each of the various municipalities of the Province of Siena. In this way it has been possible to identify and to stress, for each municipality, the cases of best practices and those of greater environmental weakness, and to provide information on the environmental impact of the different sectors of public administration and of citizens' consumption. Transactions on Ecology and the Environment vol 63, © 2003 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3541