Students from around the world calculated their class mean and standard deviations for their footprints and posted them on our world map.
Do you see differences across the globe? If so, why do you think those differences exist?
Did you use the calculator to try to reduce your footprint down to the average from a citizen of another country? What changes would you have to make to lower your footprint in this way? Are you going to try and take some of these actions in your daily life?
Student Footprints >
Something About Carbon Footprint
Carbon Footprint is the term used to describe the total amount of greenhouse gases that an individual or group emits. It’s not restricted just to our emissions of carbon dioxide but to the sum total of all our greenhouse gases, gases such as methane and nitrous oxide; collectively these emissions are measured as their equivalence in carbon dioxide.
Greenhouse gases have the ability to retain heat within our atmosphere, the more of these gases we emit the more heat is retained and as a consequence the climate warms up, this is what we refer to as global warming.
By reducing our collective carbon footprint we can go some way to reducing the impacts and delaying the onset of some of the effects.
It’s not feasible to reduce our footprint to a wholly sustainable level as there are simply too many people on the planet to achieve this, what we can do is to go some way to reducing the impacts. The remaining impact is something that we will have to deal with through mitigation or simply living with the consequences.
I think that we should try the best way to reduce my carbon footprint
I can understand why you would think that there is no way to get to a sustainable level, but econmists believe that if we switch from liquid fuels to electricity, and if we switch to clean electricity, then we can satisfy current energy use and be sustainable. But I also agree with aarav that we should do our best to try to reduce each of our footprints!