Hunan Province Sustainable Development Based On Local Ecological Footprint Evaluation

Environment is both the cause and the core issue of sustainable development. With the fast development of economy and the rapid growth of population, the energy crisis coming and the environment being destroyed day by day, regional sustainable development has become the important and hot problem in current international and civil research. Ecological footprint theory has already been extensively applied into the study of sustainable development for its many advantage, such as the precise theory framework, simple method of caculation and direct way of expression.In this paper, based on the ecological footprint method, a local ecological footprint model was introduced .At the same time, revising and adjusting this model in a suitable way.Then the improved ecological footprint model was used to assess the sustainability of social and economic development quantitatively from 1996 to 2005 for Hunan province. The change tendency of ecological footprint and its main influencing factors in Hunan province were analyzed for the last 10 years. And a series of related indicators were used to analyze the sustainable development of Hunan province .During the last 10 years, both the local ecological footprint and the local ecological capacity were increased in Hunan province. However, the local ecological footprint increased much faster than the local ecological capacity, As a result, the local ecological deficit was more and more great. To 2005, the total ecological deficit reached 92.8789 million global hectares in which is about 197 percent of the total biological capacity in Hunan. That means the total ecological footprint was 1.97 times larger than the ecological capacity in Hunan. The conflict between demand from human and supply of environment was extreme obvious, and the sustainable development of regional society faced serious eco-environmental pressure. From the aspect of the ecological footprint per-capita supply and demand structure, the conflict outstood between demand and supply of cropland and fossil fuel land. The deficit of pasture and fishing ground were relatively small in Hunan. There were partial surplus of forest and built-up area. The structure of different type of land is not rational. The prominent factor for the accelerating ecological deficit is the development of urbanization and industrialization. During this development, a large number of arable land was occupied, and the biological capacity of cropland was depressive. The demand of fossil fuel for conventional economic development is bigger and bigger.The discharge of carbon dioxide increased and the green house effect improved year by year. The deficit of fossil fuel land increased obviously.This paper selected a series of related indicators such as EFI,EOI,HEF,EE to evaluate the situation of the sustainable development of Hunan province .At last, aiming at the character of socio-economic development and resource's utilization, some suggestions are given to alleviate this city's eco-pressure.