The growing concentration of people and wealth often results in imbalances of resource consumption and carrying capacity, therefore, the sustainability assessment of urbanization can offer an important basis for global sustainable transition. This paper aims to provide an analysis of the environmental sustainability of urbanization in Hungary focusing on the long-term changes of ecological footprint and biocapacity at the sub-national level, with a special attention to the Budapest Metropolitan Region (BMR). During the research a hybrid method considering an input-output model and household consumption data was used for the calculation of regional ecological footprint, whereas biocapacity was measured on the basis of land use data. Findings suggest, that even though the ecological deficit of the country has been gradually decreasing since the early 2000s, due to a shrinking population and increasing biocapacity, the ecological overshoot is still significant in the case of Budapest and its agglomeration (30 fold and 2.4 fold respectively). The unsustainability of the BMR is caused partly by demographic factors (7.6% population growth as opposed to the the 7.7% decrease in the countryside) and partly by rising per capita ecological footprint values (especially in the agglomeration from 2.73 to 2.92 gha/capita), which are not balanced by biocapacity on the supply side. This research concluded that policy makers in ageing societies with a highly centralized urban system like Hungary should launch programmes targeted specifically to primary metropolitan areas to improve environmental efficiency and encourage people to change their consumption behaviour.

In this paper we present a complex Ecological Footprint (EF) analysis of one of the largest metropolitan regions in post-socialist East Central Europe, the Budapest Metropolitan Region. Our overall goal is to use both top-down and bottom-up approaches and measure the changes of footprint at a metropolitan scale between 2003 and 2013. Our specific objective is to explore how the spatial rearrangements of wealth, density and consumption influence the spatiotemporal changes of EF. The top-down (compound) calculations indicate growing footprint values both in Hungary and in the Budapest Metropolitan Region in the investigated period. However, household-level hybrid (component-based) calculations revealed decreasing footprint values for Hungary both in absolute and relative terms, and a growth for the metropolitan region. This finding suggests growing income disparities within the country. The indirect (consumption embedded) components of EF findings show that in the core city footprint values are higher due to higher disposable income. However, there is a gradual catching up in the suburban zone as younger and more affluent households arrive. On the other hand, direct per capita footprint values decreased in Budapest and grew in the suburbs between 2003 and 2013, mainly due to a higher heating footprint.

The Ecological Footprint (EF) has become a very popular alternative indicator of development in the last three decades. It can be widely used to show the unsustainability of total and individual levels of consumption in countries. But can EF be a meaningful indicator at the micro level as well This paper presents an argument on this issue. Based on a literature review including our own analysis and the correlation of EF with GDP and other alternative indicators, EF is evaluated at the macro level. Then, an original case study is presented, underpinning the applicability of EF on the company level, linking the ordinary corporate carbon footprinting with the EF method. Based on the findings, micro level EF calculations can help organizations in finding fields of intervention (inefficiencies and emission hotspots). EF accounting can also be used to evaluate the economic benefits of such measures after their realization.

As a yield of efforts in the international climate policy and emerging consumer awareness there is a growing interest for the quantification of corporate level carbon footprints. As a consequence, there have been numerous initiatives, guidelines and calculation methods emerged recently to be able to quantify company level direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions. Most of them are based on the philosophy and classification of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. This paper intends to provide a comparison of freely available online corporate level carbon footprint calculators with a novelty value of addressing their validity and reliability. Validity here refers to the issue whether different calculators cover the same or similar aspects or scopes of the corporate carbon footprint, while reliability addresses the question whether different calculators deliver the same or similar result if we use the same input data. Based on the example of an imaginary enterprise, we argue that validity is partly achieved, while reliability of the calculators is relatively low. This means that online corporate carbon calculators can be useful to provide a first insight for companies into their carbon footprints and they can also be useful for temporal comparisons at the level of one company (if the activity of the company is not too complex.) However, these calculators do not seem to be very appropriate for comparisons among different companies or with external benchmarks.