Ecological deficit and use of natural capital in Luxembourg from 1995 to 2009 Benedetto Rugani ⁎, Davide Roviani, Paula Hild, Bianca Schmitt, Enrico Benetto Public Research Centre Henri Tudor (CRPHT), Resource Centre for Environmental Technologies (CRTE), 6A, avenue des Hauts-Fourneaux, L-4362, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg HIGHLIGHTS • Ecological footprint and solar energy demand are investigated for Luxembourg. • Hybrid input–output models are created to assess the net consumption of the country. • Ecological deficit and use of natural capital do not remarkably increase over time. • Recommendations to improve the method and the results interpretation are advanced. abstract article info Article history: Received 11 June 2013 Received in revised form 19 July 2013 Accepted 30 July 2013 Available online 13 September 2013 Editor: Damia Barcelo Keywords: Ecological deficit Ecological footprint Emergy Environmentally extended input–output Net consumption Natural capital Scarcity of natural resources and productive land is a global issue affecting the provision of goods and services at the country scale. This is particularly true for small regions with highly developed economies such as Luxembourg, which usually balance the chronic unavailability of resources (in particular with regard to fossil fuels) with an increasing demand of imported raw materials, energy and manufactured commodities. Based on historical time-series analysis (from 1995 to 2009), this paper determines the state of natural capital (NC) utili- zation in Luxembourg and estimates its ecological deficit (ED). Accordingly, solar energy demand (SED) and ecological footprint (EF) for Luxembourg have been initially calculated based on a recently developed country- specific environmentally extended input–output model. Thereafter, these indicators have been compared to the corresponding annual trends of potential NC (estimated using the emergy concept) and biocapacity, respec- tively. Results show that the trends in ED and in the use of NC in Luxembourg have not increased substantially during the years surveyed. However, the estimates also highlight that the NC of Luxembourg is directly and indirectly overused by a factor higher than 20, while circa 9 additional ‘Luxembourg states' would be ideally necessary to satisfy the current land's requirements of the country and thus balance the impact induced by the EF. An in-depth analysis of the methodological advantages and limitations behind our modelling approach has been performed to validate our findings and propose a road map to improve the environmental accounting for NC and biocapacity in Luxembourg. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The environmental effects caused by the human appropriation of natural resources and productive lands are a concern of growing global interest for the development of sustainability management and policy initiatives. Accordingly, environmental accounting methodologies such as solar energy demand (SED) (Rugani et al., 2011) and ecological foot- print (EF) (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996) have been proposed to moni- tor the impact associated with land and resource consumptions due to economic activities. On the one hand, SED is based on the rationale behind the emergy concept (Odum, 1988, 1996) and provides an estimation of the appropriation of environmental work (in terms of solar energy requirement) by human economic systems through the natural resources used up to produce commodities (Rugani et al., 2011). A lower appropriation of environmental work per unit of product is usually interpreted as a measure of sustainability (e.g. Raugei, 2011), although this claim has not been fully proven in the literature. SED was developed for specific purposes of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Thus, it includes allocation criteria between co-products of multi-output system (user-side perspective), whereas conventional emergy accounts for the whole provision of goods and services from ecosystems irrespective of their actual use by economic activi- ties (donor-side perspective) (Rugani et al., 2013). Both SED and emergy, however, are straightforward in providing a unified and common measure to inventory and compare a large number of dif- ferent resources (e.g. freshwater, biomass, fossil fuels, metals and Science of the Total Environment 468–469 (2014) 292–301 ⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +352 425 991 682; fax: +352 425 991 555. E-mail address: benedetto.rugani@tudor.lu (B. Rugani). 0048-9697/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2013.07.122 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Science of the Total Environment journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/scitotenv