The Ecological Footprint Depth: preliminary consideration for national accounting

Natural capital is becoming a limiting factor to human well-being and definitively to sustainability: ecological overshoot, all ineludible reality, is one of the most important evidence of it. Maintaining (and investing in) capital natural is essential to secure living condition on this planet. For this reason the differentiation between the use of natural capital flows and the depletion of natural capital stock is becoming matter of particular interest in sustainability theory. In our previous work (How deep is the footprint? A 3D representation 2009) we proposed a variant to the traditional Ecological Footprint framework, to capture for these two opposite concepts. In particularly a 3D-EF model was presented and a new dimension called Ecological Footprint Depth of simply Depth was introduced. The aim of this paper is to propose an adaptation of the model for the national level. A theoretical explanation oil how to distinguish the two components is also offered. Two nations, Italy and the USA, were considered as reference for this study.