Abstract: Because human consume the products and services of nature, every one of us has an impact on the earth. Whether or not the human load stay within global carrying capacity? The ecological footprint concept which was put forward in recent years by ecologicaleconomist E. R. William and M.Wackernage1 has been designed to answer this question and estimate the impact on nature. It is a useful indicator for measuring the pressure imposed by human on nature capital and also a powerful indicator for regional sustainability. The ecological footprint of any defined population is the total area of ecologically productive land and water occupied exclusively to produce all the resources consumed and to assimilate all the wastes generated by the population. The ecological footprint and its calculation method is introduced in the paper. This article analyses the ecological footprint of Hunan Province in 2000. The ecological footprint ledger is composed with three main parts:①biotic resources;②energy consumption; and ③trade balance. With natural capital production at the regional level using existing data. Based on the ecological footprint method, in the case of Hunan Province, the result shows that the per capita deficit of ecological footprint was 0.532 4 per capita in 2000, and the development at present is disadvantageous for achieving sustainable development. At last, a brief comment about the theory of ecological footprint is put forward.

Key words: ecological footprint, measuring sustainable development, ecological productive area, Hunan Province