Ecological footprint model based on improved BP network

The per capita ecological footprint (EF) is one of the most-widely recognized measures of environmental sustainability. It tries to quantify the earth´s biological capacity required to support human activity. This study at first summarize the previous literature, and then present the five factors which influenced the per capita EF, they are the nation´s GDP, urbanization independent of economic development, the distribution of income measured with the Gini coefficient, Exports as percentage of total GDP, Service as the percentage of total GDP. On the base of it, an ecological footprint model based on improved BP network (IBPN) is conducted to predict the 24 nation´s per capita EF used the 123 nation´s data. The forecasting accuracy is measured by average absolute error and average relative error. They are 0.0022842 and 0.016206% respectively. The results demonstrate that the EF model based on IBPN has good forecasting performance.