Ecological Footprint accounting quantifies the supply and demand of Earth’s biocapacity. The National Footprint Accounts (NFA) are the most widely used Ecological Footprint (EF) dataset, and provide results for most countries and the world from 1961 to 2014, based primarily on publicly available UN datasets. Here, we review the evolution of the NFA, describe and quantify the effects of improvements that have been implemented into the accounts since the 2012 edition, and review the latest global trends. Comparing results over six editions of NFAs, we find that time-series trends in world results remain stable, and that the world Ecological Footprint for the latest common year (2008) has increased six percent after four major accounting improvements and more than thirty minor improvements. The latest results from the NFA 2018 Edition for the year 2014 indicate that humanity’s Ecological Footprint is 1.7 Earths, and that global ecological overshoot continues to grow. While improved management practices and increased agricultural yields have assisted in a steady increase of Earth’s biocapacity since 1961, humanity’s Ecological Footprint continues to increase at a faster pace than global biocapacity, particularly in Asia, where the total and per capita Ecological Footprint are increasing faster than all other regions.

Tourism represents a key economic sector worldwide, constituting great leverage for local economic development but also putting noticeable environmental pressures on local natural resources. Ecotourism may be a viable alternative to mass tourism to minimize impacts on ecosystems, but it needs shared sustainability standards and monitoring tools to evaluate impacts. This paper presents a first methodological proposition to calculate the environmental impact of ecotourism packages through the use of an ad-hoc, customized version of the Ecological Footprint methodology. It follows a participatory, bottom-up approach to collecting input data for the four main services (Accommodation, Food & Drinks, Activity & Service, and Mobility & Transfer) provided to tourists through the use of surveys and stakeholders engagement. The outcome of our approach materializes in an excel-based ecotourism workbook capable of processing input data collected through surveys and returning Ecological Footprint values for specific ecotourism packages. Although applied to ecotourism in Mediterranean Protected Areas within the context of the DestiMED project, we believe that the methodology and approach presented here can constitute a blueprint and a benchmark for future studies dealing with the impact of ecotourism packages.