Mapping National Environmental Sustainability Distribution by Ecological Footprint: The Case of Italy

Silvio Franco, Barbara Pancino and Angelo Martella
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Silvio Franco: Department of Economics, Engineering, Society and Business Organizations, University of Tuscia, 01100 Viterbo, Italy
Barbara Pancino: Department of Economics, Engineering, Society and Business Organizations, University of Tuscia, 01100 Viterbo, Italy
Angelo Martella: Department of Economics, Engineering, Society and Business Organizations, University of Tuscia, 01100 Viterbo, Italy

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 15, 1-14

Abstract: The paper proposes a possible way of spatially representing sustainability in Italy. For this purpose, the ecological footprint approach was used as a methodological framework to assess the level of sustainability of the 8092 Italian municipalities. For each municipality, the exploitation of ecosystem services, assessed by the ecological footprint indicator, and the corresponding availability of biological capacity, associated to an indicator, have been calculated and compared, thus generating a map representing the relative sustainability of Italian municipalities. The results show a very scattered distribution of ecological balance, wherein unsustainable conditions characterize more than 60% of the territory and almost 95% of the Italian population. Despite the limitations of the methodology and some assumptions regarding the ecological footprint assessment at the municipality level, the study represents an attempt to produce an innovating tool that, based on an operational definition of sustainability, can represent natural resource exploitation at the local level, and provide useful information to address coherent and targeted environmental policies of sustainability.

Keywords: ecological footprint; Italian municipalities; sustainability map (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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