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 >
What I Can Do Better
I never really realized how much certain parts of my life affected the earth. This exercise was interesting because it showed that most of my carbon footprint comes from food. I am not a vegan or vegetarian however seeing how much meat products affect the outcome was shocking, and I will try and be warier about how much meat I consume. One thing I was interested in was how is using an electric car still adding to my carbon footprint? It is odd to me because we have solar and an electric car so our charging comes straight from our solar.
The next thing I wanted to talk about was how much airplanes impact my footprint. According to Hannah Richie from ourworldindata.org, "Aviation overall accounts for only 2.5% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions" (Richie 1). This is shocking to me because I have never thought too hard about how much CO2 a plane emits. One other statistic from this was that aviation emissions have seen a 4-5% growth per year since 2010. That means that there has been a constant rise in emission which is scary. In conclusion, this activity was very interesting to me and will help me become warier about my carbon footprint.