Ecological Footprint Evaluation: An Empirical Study of the Bohai Coast of the Jing-Jin-Ji Region

This article studies the resources and environmental carrying capacity of Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei in China with an ecological-footprint evaluation index that was constructed for cultivated land, forest land, grassland, construction land, water area, and fossil fuel land. The ecological footprint and the ecological carrying-capacity comprehensive index methods are used to, respectively, reveal how much natural resources have been used and nature's ability to provide products and services. The ecological deficit or surplus reflected by the difference between them is used to show the state and trend of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region ecological environment. The results showed that, because of the long-term ecological deficit caused by the limited supply of natural resources, the per capita ecological carrying capacity of the Beijing and Tianjin Province has always been lower than the per capita ecological footprint. The consumption of natural resources in Hebei Province is still mainly reflected in the consumption of coal, petroleum-based energy, and the production of agricultural resource-based biological resources, and the development model is still the same as it was in 2010-consuming existing natural resources to make up for the lack of ecological carrying capacity.