Your footprint
We all want to do the right thing, but what exactly is ‘right’? Knowing that we have an impact, a footprint on the world doesn’t help – what does help is knowing where that footprint comes from, knowing which of the things we’re doing is the worst.
And knowing which are the right choices for making things better.
Measuring your carbon
One of the worst things we do is add to the carbon in the atmosphere (see the Nutshell). We do it with the food we eat, the things we buy, the way we travel, the energy we burn – in every part of our lives.
Working out just where the carbon comes from is difficult. Luckily, some people enjoy the challenge. Carbon calculators help you look at your life and figure out what choices would be best for you to make, which changes would have the biggest effect.
Some changes you’ll be able to make for yourself, for some you might need your family, friends, or to form a community group. For others, you’ll just have to be noisy, and add the influence of the pound in your pocket, your name on a petition, your vote in a ballot-box to the many others trying to get changes we all need made.
How big are my feet?
Here are some carbon footprint calculators to try out. We don’t recommend any one over the others, they all do slightly different things, they all simplify your life in different ways, but they all offer insight into your life, and the difference you could make.
Try them all (and only use the free bits):
Ecological footprint
Your carbon isn’t the end of it. It doesn’t count every way in which we leave a mark on our Earth. We’re catching up with the idea that people leave a bigger footprint than just carbon, an ecological footprint. (In February 2020 Bristol City Council followed up its earlier climate emergency declaration with an ecological emergency.)
Our ecological footprint totals the amount of land we need to provide us with everything we use up, and to handle the waste that we make. We measure it in Earths. If everyone lived as we do in Britain, we’d need about 3 Earths. As it stands, most of the world is less wealthy than us, less wasteful and voracious – we only need 1.7. That means for 5 months of the year, we’re taking more from the Earth than it can put back.
In 2021, we’d used up our supply of Earth for the year by July 29. It’s called World Overshoot Day. It’s getting earlier every year.