Whats your Ecological Footprint?
www.ecofoot.org can help calculate your ecological footprint
For many readers of Low Impact, the concept of an “ecological footprint” won’t be anything new. Basically, your footprint is the amount of the Earth’s resources that are necessary to support your lifestyle.
So, for instance, if you eat a lot of meat, use a lot of energy and buy a lot of consumable goods, you require a lot of the Earth’s resources. By contrast, if you use renewable energy, eat mostly plant-based foods, and buy relatively few material goods, you make less call on the Earth’s resources.
It’s always going to be an approximate measure, but it’s a handy way of visualising the impact we have as individuals on the planet. It can help to reinforce the concept that we all have a role to play in lowering our impact on the environment - learning just how much of the planet’s resources you are burning up can be a powerful motivator for change!
A great example of a site that can help calculate your ecological footprint is http://www.ecofoot.org. They have a very snazzy Flash application on their site that will ask you a series of question, and then tell you how many Planet Earths would be required if everyone shared your lifestyle.
It’s a comprehensive questionnaire that touches on many different aspects of your life. Your diet, car, use of public transport, choice of heating, choice of dwelling and holiday destinations are all taken into account. Along the way, you have the choice of answering a brief summary (Do you eat meat a lot/not much each week?) or a more in-depth grilling (Separately answer how much pork, beef, lamb, chicken and dairy you eat). You are also asked which country you live in (the USA and Australia are the currently supported countries) as this can have a significant bearing on the environmental impact of different activities.
Assuming you’re curious as to how they calculated your footprint (”surely it can’t be that much?!”), its worth checking out the “Data and Methods” link which will take you to a number of papers discussing the methodologies and statistics the calculation is based on.
So, if you have a spare 5 or 10 minutes, its worth a visit - you might be surprised at the result. And for the record, if the world shared my lifestyle (I’m a mostly-vegetarian, green-energy-using, walk-to-the-shops, drive-a-hybrid, ride-a-bike sort of guy), it would require almost 2 Planet Earths to support us all!
Clearly I still have a bit of work to do… 
Categories: environment, green, reduce
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August 21st, 2008 at 4:54 pm
1.6 Earths!
However, I should note that other quizzes have given me 1-4 Earths. A similar range of results is achieved by carbon calculators, as reported here.
The problem is that each has different assumptions behind it. For example, your linked one asked how often I ate beef, a few times a week, a few times a month, daily or what. But it didn’t ask the quantity. So that someone who eats meat as a flavouring, 50 grams a day, ends up with a larger ecological footprint than someone who eats a big 350g steak three times a week.
But they want to make it quick and snappy, most people don’t know how much money they spend on groceries, let alone the weight of beef they eat each time, so the survey just makes some assumptions, something like “each time they eat meat, it’ll be a 220g serve.”
Each survey has different assumptions, and thus each gives different results.
Despite these things giving us numbers, it’s best to think of them in qualitative terms, rather than quantitative. The thing gives you a score, and you compare your score today with your score yesterday. So if I can change things to lower the Earths it takes to support my lifestyle, it doesn’t really matter than Calculator A says I went from 6.3 to 4.2 and Calculator B says I went from 2.1 to 1.5; the point is that I lowered it.
It’s like when you get marks at school, getting an A in January and then a D in February gives you a very different reaction compared to going from D to A! Your parents are concerned less with your absolute grade, and more that you’re getting better - or at least not worse. If you think of these carbon calculators in those terms, they’re more useful. If you get hung up on the exact numbers you get nowhere.