Abstract: With the increase of population and deepening of industrialization, human acquires more and more resources from nature while evacuating wastes to environment constantly, which have already exceeded supply and capacity of ecosystem and resulted in deterioration of ecological environment, lose of soil, degradation of grassland, withering of vegetation, decrease of biodiversity and global warming. All these have become so serious that people have difficulties to control. Hence, more and more people began to pay attention to sustainable development. This paper analyzed the relationship between the ecological footprints of China’s provinces in 1999 and their impact factors quantitatively with the principal components method. The results showed that the ecological footprints are impacted by the factors of numbers of corporations, social investment in fixed assets etc., in which population and GDP are the main impact factors. A problem worthy to be point out is that the correlation between non-agricultural population and ecological footprint is bigger than the correlation between agricultural population and ecological footprint, indicating that the amount of non-agricultural population can bring more impacts to ecological footprint than agricultural population resulted from the difference of model of consumption and standard of living. Based on the research, the regressive equation of ecological footprints and their impact factors is established in order to offer new ideas for the assessment of measuring sustainable development with the method of ecological footprint at regional level.

Key words: ecological footprint, impact factor, principal components method