The Province of Venice (Italy) is one of the most beautiful and complex humanenvironmental systems in the world. The principal aspects of this environmental study are: i) the presence of a lagoon, which is a particularly productive and fragile ecosystem ii) a high consumption of energy and material resources due to the high urbanization and population density iii) the importance and the impact of the great number of tourists who every day visit historical and coastal areas of the province. This paper discusses the results obtained from the calculation of the ecological footprint (EF), as proposed by Wackernagel and Rees. This is an areabased indicator which provides information on the use and the consumption of natural services and can be compared with the local biocapacity in order to acquire a deeper understanding of the state of the environment. In order to take into account the real lagoon contribution to the local biocapacity, an ex-novo equivalence factor and yield factor were also calculated. The paper expands on the methodological framework for the calculation of the EF related to the leisure tourism offered by Gossling et al. Tourism as the world’s largest and most globally pervasive industry represents a pressure element in many localized human-environmental systems, and in particular for Venice.
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Bagliani et al. (2004) studied this question.