The analysis presented in this paper takes into consideration the environmental sustainability of the Piedmont Region based on the use of the Ecological Footprint. This indicator of sustainability considers the impact that a population has on the environment by calculating the productive surface necessary to produce, in a sustainable way, all the utilized resources and to reabsorb, also in a sustainable way, all the emissions released. This study develops a work of Bicknell and collaborators. We propose a method of calculation that keeps the main characteristics of the Ecological Footprint definition but restructures the mathematical formalism on the basis of Leontief s Input-Output matrices. This new version of the Ecological Footprint allows deeper insights into the sustainability of the economic system by considering the environmental sustainability of each economic sector and the sustainability of the input-output flows through the different sectors. To test the new method we have applied it to the case study of the Piedmont Region. The analysis, applied to each of the Piedmont Provinces, comprises a detailed description of the environmental sustainability of the economic system. Furthermore, it illustrates the performances, advantages and limits of applicability of our method.
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