There is a growing consensus among natural and social scientists that sustainability depends on maintaining natural capital. However, progress to put this ecological condition to practice has been slow, not least because of the inability of making these objectives measurable. Therefore, to overcome this obstacle, assessment frameworks for natural capital are needed. This study presents a simple framework for national and global natural capital accounting. It demonstrates, using the example of Italy, an accounting framework which tracks national economies’ energy and resource throughput and translates them into biologically productive areas necessary to produce these flows. This calculation has been applied to over 52 countries. With this framework, based on the ecological footprint concept, human consumption can be compared with natural capital production at the global and national level, using existing data. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.