The traditional ecological footprint models, developed to access the sustainability of regional developments. Their calculations used “biologically productive areas with world average productivity” as a common measurement unit for ecological footprints and carrying capacity. However, the basis of land productivity was subject to many limitations. In this study we present a new ecological footprint model which is based on the emergy theory. A sustainability evaluation index is also put forward to indicating the extent of the environmental resources use. The new model focused on the ecological carrying capacity and the demand of ecological footprints for sustaining regional development using the emergy transfomity and emergy density concepts in the emergy theory. The emergy analysis measures both the work of nature and that of humans in generating products and services. By multiplying the amount of energy with its solar emergy transformity, we can easily quantify different kinds of products, services and environmental work with a single universal unit in solar emergy emjoules. The objective of this paper is to improve the ecological footprint model by introducing the emergy analysis into the calculation process and test the model in Xuzhou City. The emergy\|based ecological carrying capacity (EECC) was estimated based on regional renewable resources and the renewable portion of the biologically productive land. The emergy\|based ecological footprints (EEF) were calculated according to the natural resource consumption within the region and the regional resource outputs. Our calculations began with the annual solar emergy of earth geobiosphere in calculating regional emergy density. Then, regional renewable resources, renewable portion of biologically productive land, and most of the consumed resources were converted to corresponding emergy amount through emergy analysis. According to respective formula, total amount of emergy\|related divided by regional emergy density can obtain emergy\|based ecological carrying capacity and ecological footprints. In this way, the capacity areas and footprints areas both have the same connotation, namely, the regional emergy density. We applied the improved emergy\|based model to Xuzhou City and found that the emergy\|based ecological carrying capacity was 1.03 hm2 per capita and the emergy\|based ecological footprint was 37.76 hm2 per capita in Xuzhou City in 2006, which was 4.4 and 4.3 times higher than those of previous models respectively. The emergy\|based ecological carrying capacity would be 2.6 times higher, if the transformities were not modified based on the new global emergy baseline reference standard. Our results indicated that the renewable part of the biologically productive land accounted for a large proportion of the regional ecological capacity and a large portion of the footprints in Xuzhou was contributed to exporting resources to other regions ouside of the city. The sustainability emergy index (SEI) was 0.97 which indicated the sustainable development of Xuzhou was of concern. The developing strategies for the natural resource\|dependent economy city should focus on optimizing economic structure, increasing resource use efficiency, and balancing economic development and eco\|environment protection. Such as controlling the exploitation scale, extending the industrial chain, increasing the added value of export products and developing and utilizing renewable energy should be taken into account.