Carbon Footprints
A carbon footprint is a measurement of total CO2 or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are generated by an entity - individuals, events, organisations, products, services - through the burning of fossil fuels to carry out their activities or production. A carbon footprint is usually expressed as a weight of carbon dioxide (equivalent) in tonnes.
Personal carbon footprint
It is often cited that GHG emissions need to be significantly reduced in order to limit global warming and avoid catastrophic impacts of climate change. To keep to the 1.5℃ goal of the Paris Agreement, it is predicted that annual lifestyle carbon footprints would need to be roughly 2 - 2.5 tonnes per person by 2030.
Globally, the average carbon footprint today is close to 5 tonnes per person, but in more economically developed nations average carbon footprints are often much higher than this. To give some perspective; the average carbon footprint per person in the United States is approx. 16 tonnes, in Belgium 8 tonnes, and in China 7 tonnes. Comparing this to 2 tonnes in India and 0.1 tonnes in Ethiopia, for example – we can see that between nations large inequalities exist.
In countries where the average carbon footprint is particularly high, reduction needs to occur on a large scale, so as to allow less economically developed nations room to develop (as development is in most part still tied to increased GHG emissions).
What are the best ways to reduce your carbon footprint?
Today, the majority of an individual’s carbon footprint comes from three areas in particular: housing, food and transport. To see a significant reduction in personal carbon footprints therefore, change would usually need to be realised in one or more of these components.
The Financial Times released a report recently showing a large perception gap between the lifestyle decisions that people think are most effective for limiting their carbon footprint, and those that have the biggest impact in practice.
The report cites the most effective actions to reduce annual emissions - including the most impactful: going child free which can save 58.6 tonnes of emissions per year. Other effective carbon saving behaviour changes include: not having a car (- 2.4 tonnes); avoiding one long distance flight (- 1.6 tonnes); buying renewable energy (- 1.5 tonnes); and eating a plant-based diet ( -1.1 tonnes).