| Sustainable development is one of the biggest tasks we face to establish on a global scale, in order to secure, and to ultimately achieve sustainable development, one prerequisite is to understand our current resource conditions. Furthermore we need to assess the sustainability of our development, and forecast variation trends of sustainability. As a method to analyze sustainable development, due to it's simplicity and convenience in calculation, ecological footprint methods have been wildly studied around the world since its initial proposal in 1992. This article starts by introducing the basic methods of ecological footprint, connect it with the latest research progress of the ecological footprint, then discusses the analysis methods of different ecological footprint accounts in sustainable development analyzing in detail. These discussions arrive at the following conclusions:1) By studying ecological footprint accounts on a world scale, we can understand the track of human development, and find the major cause of unsustainable development, also, it can help us understanding our natural capital, and monitoring the changes of natural capital, tracking countries consumption pattern of resources, declare the responsibility of each country which should take responsibility for the current environmental issues.2) Studying the ecological footprint on a regional scale will help local governments to understand and manage the local ecological demands and supplies, and help governments in building local competitiveness of regional sustainable development, manage public assets, and reach a balance of ecological economic growth etc.3) Studying the personal ecological footprint account, will help us to promote and build ecological culture, guide people to change their lifestyle and shift to a more sustainable lifestyle. develop reasonable consuming habits, all this will have a positive effect on the development of human sustainability.The article also discusses the development of the ecological footprint method compare with the newly applied methods derived from the basic ecological analysis, especially comparing the ecological footprint with the carbon footprint, and water footprint. At last by calculating and analyzing the ecological footprint of Tianjin from 2003 to 2007 to explain the practice of ecological footprint analysis in detail, also we reach the following conclusions:In 2007, Tianjin, the per capita ecological footprint include food and energy was 2.07209 ha/percapita, but the ecological capacity per capita supply in Tianjin is 0.28079 ha/percapita in the same year, which means for each person live in Tianjin there is an ecological deficit of 1.7913 ha/percapita. This figure is higher than the world average level, also higher than China's average per capita ecological deficit. On the one hand, the results explain the rapid economic development of Tianjin in recent years, but on the other hand it also illustrates the current development in Tianjin, there is still a distance away from sustainable development. By associate these findings of ecological footprint analysis with the present conditions of Tianjin, the article provides some policy recommendations in sustainable development strategy. Then discuss the ecological footprint evaluation of functions in evaluating the effectiveness of economics from an ecological viewpoint, and compared with the green GDP. Then we find that ecological footprint analysis methods mainly focus on tracking and explain changes of natural capital, and pointed out that ecological footprint method, is correspondingly, more convenient in calculation, and its results are more comparable than green GDP.
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