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 main aim of this paper is to explore how daily commuting has contributed to the changes of ecological footprint in the Buda-pest urban region since 1990 by using census data of 1990, 2001 and 2011. First, the func-tional urban region of Budapest was delim-ited using the 15% threshold of daily com-muting to work to Budapest in 2001. Accord-ing to international methodology 185 sur-rounding municipalities and Budapest were defined as the urban region. Using data on the transport vehicle of commuting the vol-ume of CO2 emissions was estimated at mu-nicipal level for the 185 municipalities. Final-ly, on the basis of emission values the ecolog-ical footprint of the whole urban region was estimated. Our results show declining ecolog-ical footprint values throughout the 1990s, due to decreasing commuting rates, which is the result of economic restructuring, growing unemployment and less mobility of the la-bour force. However, as commuting in-creased due to economic upswing after 2000 the ecological footprint also grew, the use of motor vehicles (private car and bus) in com-muting substantially and dynamically in-creased. In the reviewed periodspatial struc-ture of commuting significantly changed: rail-commuting shrunk into a few outstanding transport axes, whereas the use of passenger cars increased also in the less booming areas of the urban agglomeration.