Carbon footprints and Ecological footprints

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Carbon footprints and Ecological footprints
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CO2 emission per capita
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Carbon footprint

• Carbon footprint is a measure of the amount of
  carbon dioxide or CO2 emitted through the
  combustion of fossil fuels
• in the case of an organization, business or
  enterprise, as part of their everyday operations
  
• in the case of an individual or household, as
  part of their daily lives
• or a product or commodity in reaching market.
• For materials, is essentially a measure of
  embodied energy, the result of life cycle
  analysis.

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Carbon footprint

• A carbon footprint is often expressed as tons of
  carbon dioxide or tons of carbon emitted, usually
  on a yearly basis.
• There are many versions of calculators available
  for carbon footprinting most of the ones on the
  web are used to get you to buy products in the
  guise of being more Earth friendly!

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Carbon footprint

• It is directly related to the amount of natural
  resources consumed and increasingly used or
  referred to as a measure of environmental impact.
  
• Carbon dioxide is recognized as a greenhouse gas,
  of which increasing levels in the atmosphere are
  linked to global warming and climate change.

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Activities that affect the carbon footprint of
individuals

• Car travel depends on distance driven, fuel
  efficiency, and number of passengers per vehicle.
  
• Air travel depends on distance and number of
  flights. Take-off and landing use large amounts
  of fuel, so two short flights produce more carbon
  than one long flight of comparative distance.
• Boat travel depends on distance travelled, fuel
  efficiency, and size of the boat. Can produce up
  to 8 times more carbon dioxide than an airplane
  traveling the same distance citation needed.

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Activities that affect the carbon footprint of
individuals

• Other motorised transport such as bus or train
  normally counts for less per person than either
  car or air travel.
• Electricity use, if provided by non-renewable
  resources. (Some calculators ask for figures from
  utility bills, while others estimate the amount
  from size of household and usage patterns (such
  as whether you leave equipment on standby
  overnight)).

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Activities that affect the carbon footprint of
individuals

• Home heating depends on fuel source and amount
  used.
• Food miles how much food you buy from non-local
  sources.
• Diet - meat-eater, vegetarian or vegan,
  conventionally farmed foods or organic produce.
  Production of food includes fuel use for
  cultivation and processing and packaging.

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Ecological footprint

• The phrase "ecological footprint" is a metaphor
  used to depict the amount of land and water area
  a human population would hypothetically need to
  provide the resources required to support itself
  and to absorb its wastes, given prevailing
  technology.
• The term was first coined in 1992 by Canadian
  ecologist and professor at the University of
  British Columbia, William Rees.

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Ecological footprint

• Footprinting is now widely used around the globe
  as an indicator of environmental sustainability.
• It can be used to measure and manage the use of
  resources throughout the economy.
• It is commonly used to explore the sustainability
  of individual lifestyles, goods and services,
  organisations, industry sectors, neighborhoods,
  cities, regions and nations.

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Ecological footprint

• Ecological footprint analysis approximates the
  amount of ecologically productive land, sea and
  other water mass area required to sustain a
  population, manufacture a product, or undertake
  certain activities, by accounting the use of
  energy, food, water, building material and other
  consumables.
• The calculations used typically convert this
  into a measure of land area used in 'global
  hectares' (gha) per capita.

• A hectare is 10,000 square metres (a square with
  a 100 m side)

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Ecological footprint

• It is a way of determining relative consumption
  for the purpose of educating people about their
  resource use and, sometimes, triggering them to
  alter their over-consumption.
• It can be combined with overpopulation concerns
  and stated as "the number of Earths it would take
  to support every human living exactly the way you
  do."

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Ecological footprint

• Ecological footprints have been used to argue
  that current lifestyles are not sustainable.
• For example, the average "earthshare" available
  to each human citizen is approximately 1.9 gha
  per capita.
• The US average footprint is 9.5 gha per capita,
  and that of Switzerland 4 gha, whilst China's is
  circa 1.5 gha per head at the moment!

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Criticisms

• Calculated footprints can be inaccurate due to
  simplifying assumptions.
• Many factors of the calculations are based on
  crude estimates and the numbers may not be
  applicable to all places (the method is biased to
  Northern Hemisphere lifestyles).
• Also, the model generally does not count multiple
  uses of land a forest is a carbon sink and the
  same area is not counted for food production.

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Criticisms

• The per-person nature of footprinting is
  questionable.
• For example, the model favors households with
  more children A large house with ten children
  has a smaller per-person footprint than a house
  half its size with only one person.
• This could be a perverse result, since having
  more children might add to global overpopulation,
  with high ecological costs in the future.
• This would only occur if most of the world had or
  began having large families.

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Criticisms

• Currently many countries are experiencing slow or
  even negative population growth (ex. Bulgaria,
  Latvia, Estonia, Germany, and Poland).
• To counter these uncertainties, the models of
  ecological footprinting are constantly being
  refined.

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