| Just as Wackemagel said, "The core of sustainable development is how to manage natural capital, the efficiency of which depends on effective means of quantitive measurement." China is both a large producer and a consumer of natural resources, which makes it particularly important to quantitively analyze the pressure already existed in the natural ecosystem and the possible development trend in future. Because the quantitive measurement of natural ecosystem not only has impact on the implementation of related policies, but also determines the realization of sustainable development in our country. It is the ligament that communicates the theory and practice of sustainable development.Experts from home and aboard have done a lot of research on the quantitive measurement of sustainable development. Generally it can be classified into two kinds according to the evolvement of theory. One is the traditional measurement, which uses money value to evaluate the negative effects of human beings on environment. We call it "measurement from quantity to value"; the other method abandons value transformation and adopt "measurement from quantity to quantity". However, no matter it is from the point of value measurement or quantity measurements, both methods above have certain kind of limitations. In the real measurement of natural capital, it is indeed difficult to find a method which could not only reflects its state of use, but also express it in a simple and easy way. Therefore, in practice, the measurement and evaluation of natural capital often chooses the way according to the purpose and don't require completeness. When analyzing the pressure of natural ecosystem in this paper, the research subject only refers to the core of natural capital-land, and the measurement subject only includes the renewable part in natural resources.In my view, ecological footprint is a better way to measure whether use of natural resources and waste discharge of human beings has exceeded the renewable ability of natural resources. Through the trace of regional resources and energy consumption, this method provides a way of transforming them into productive land areas providing or absorbing them, which then is compared with the real productive land area in the region. Thus it provides a way of judging whether human consumption is within the carrying capacity of the land. It can also be used to evaluate whether the effects of human beings on natural environment exceed its limitation. So this model includes certain kind of sustainable development mechanism.Compared with other research, the innovation of this essay is as follows:(1) The integrative mastery of the definition of ecological footprint model. As the domestic research is incompatible in index classification and content definition, this essay adopts standardized ecological footprint model as the analysis framework and classify indices in the model according to international standards. The aim of it is to avoid the up biased result of ecological footprint resulting from account overlapping and misclassification, thus making the international comparison fits the nation's situation more closely. (2) The structure and scale of future consumption of natural resource in China is predicted by using the BP neural network model in this paper. Because of its well parallel disposal ability, the BP neural network model can predict and simulate complicated non-linear and multi-index problem. It is one of the creative methods of related research in China, which helps to delicate analysis of consumption structure of earth resource such as infield, woodland, water area and lawn, etc. Nowadays the related domestic studies of prediction mostly adopt liner regression or scene forecast method, which can not clearly demonstrate the rule of changing of demand structure of natural resource in China, as the consumption of natural resource is a complicated, non-linear system the normal methods may weaken the significance of application and its use for reference on public policy(3) The author develops the method of calculation of the ecological footprint model. Based on the standard ecological footprint model, the method of constant production in the world, the method of changing production in the world and the actual local production are adopted in researching the ecological pressure and environmental influence on natural clime system in China in the paper. Adopting the method of constant production in world meets need of the comparison study across countries while using the method of local production helps to make references on public policy according to the actual status of domestic natural resource consumption. In addition, the method of time series on dynamic analysis which is better than static state analysis is also adopted in this paper, which offers strong support both on theory and on policy-making.(4) The implemental scope of the model of ecological footprint is widened in this paper. The author not only calculates the ecological footprint, estimates the natural clime system, but also widens the implemental scope to more fields, such as the problem of food security, the problem of appropriate ecological population scale, the problem between economic development and environment protection and the research on the ability of natural ecosystem development.(5) Though the ecological footprint model has included the mechanism of persistent developing as the creator said, the ecosystem-footprint model is only a method for quantitatively measuring the influence and pressure on human behavior to ecological environment, not available for persistent development. Therefore, based on the comparison with other quantitative measurements, this paper indicates that this model has the advantage of simplicity and directness. But it has only considered the absorption of CO2, using the model to evaluate the sustainable development not only cause the problem of underestimating, but also may mislead the judgment. The persistent development problem is a systematical engineering, but some research has not considered the complexity of the sustainable development problem while using the model. Based on the indication of deficiency, the model is treated differently, and the deeply theoretical discussion is also performed in this paper.
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