Please check these links and pdf attachments for said query.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ACarbon_footprint

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238622341_Literature_Review_on_Carbon_Footprint_Collection_and_Analysis

Article Literature Review on Carbon Footprint Collection and Analysis

Daer Jayme, For me the term carbon footprint is just an application of the much more important definition of the Brundtland report about sustainability. Unfortunately the climate change hype replaced a little the background and the main target of sustainbility from the focus of policy. Probably the link might help you. Regs WW

sorry, I forgot to press add for the link

http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/csd/csd15/media/backgrounder_brundtland.pdf

Carbon footprint evolved as a part of the 'ecological footprint' concept which was devised by William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel. In this paper from jan 1996

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226184045_Revisiting_Carrying_Capacity_Area-Based_Indicators_of_Sustainability

William Rees described how carbon-assimilation is part of the ecological footprint but here he used the term 'energy footprint' and not carbon footprint.

I'm not sure who first used the term, but I do know that it wasn't until 2006 that it became more widespread. One of the earliest references to carbon footprint I am aware of is this patent filed in oct 2005 https://www.google.com/patents/US20060089851 but I don't think that's the first usage of the term. According to Google Trends the term was already used occasionally when Google started collecting query data in 2004: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22carbon%20footprint%22

Article Revisiting Carrying Capacity: Area-Based Indicators of Sustainability

I agree wth the answes above: this is quite unfortunate that only "carbon" is usually kept, as the principle of LCA ( Life Cycle Analysis) is much wider, and does not only focus on carbon, but measure the impacts and resources depletion broadly. There are even SLCA (Social LCA) that take into account the social footprint in addition to the environmental impacts. Rgds

You can check the Brundtland report... it's possible to find the idea about this concept.

regards

The carbon footprint concepts were introduced about a decade ago,The CF arose out of the debate on climate change, as a tool to measure GHG emissions. the term chosen was inspired by the ecological footprint (EF), which had been introduced in the 1990s

Please, look to Wikipedia...