Calculate

Calculating your carbon footprint is useful in that the very act of doing this raises awareness. Once you can put a number upon your different activities then you know where the biggest gains can be made - and at what cost. For example, your air-miles will certainly stack up to a large proportion of your personal allocation. You could sign up to a renewable energy tariff tomorrow yet still find that it makes an almost insignificant impact upon your footprint if you take three foreign holidays a year. Knowledge is power.

However, the numbers are only really useful if you know:

• how you compare against everyone else

• where you want to get to

Per person (in the UK) we generate 12.5 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide. However, that is measured upon the basis of total economic output. If we focuses on OUR homes and personal transport then we are individually only directly responsible for half of that - about 6 tonnes. The rest is contributed from the manufacture and provision of all the goods and services we consume. Hence we are indirectly responsible for the other 6.5. Hence we add it on top. As a basic rule of thumb we should calculate our personal footprint and then double it.

The worst Carbon Footprint in the World belongs to the citizens of the USA which works out at nearly double that of the average UK citizen. However the UK numbers are higher then several European neighbours and grossly higher than almost any other country on Earth (2.5 times the average)- including China! By the way: China in 2007 invested £6 billion (GBP) in renewables - second only to Germany.

It is claimed that some online Calculators are misleading. Don't be put off by this. Certainly the numbers used in the calculations may differ slightly from source to source but you should not find this to be significant. However there are alleged to be several online calculators of CO2 emissions from Airline Travel that use only the most basic numbers. You should know that high flying aircraft produce a cocktail of Green House Gases and water vapour at high altitude. Taken together this means you must multiply the resulting CO2 footprint by 2.7 to get the equivalent Green House gas footprint.

The list of resource we list (below) should be the best as recommended by Ethical Consumer Magazine (EC109 - Nov/Dec 2007). Explore these and get started......