Getting on track

While these days the term 'carbon footprint' feels ubiquitous, for most people, their carbon footprint really isn't something they concern themselves with on a regular basis. If you think about that, it seems kind of weird: We have all kinds of concrete metrics around us that we depend on for everyday decisions, be it our bank account balance, the fuel meter in our cars or our smart watch's activity tracking. Yet despite all the buzz about climate change, when it comes to our individual climate and environmental impacts, there really isn't much concrete information in our everyday lives. At this point, let’s introduce one change to our terminology: let’s call it climate footprint instead of carbon footprint, to signal that it also includes greenhouse gasses other than CO₂ (more on this below).
Sure, there exist some tools that we can consult to calculate our climate footprint, but they are rather inconvenient to use and their results are rough, momentary snapshots. In other contexts, we wouldn't accept such a lack of information, and frankly, we also shouldn't when it comes to measuring (and ultimately reducing) our climate impact. Image going grocery shopping in a supermarket without a single price tag. Figuring out what you’d have to pay at the cashier would be guesswork. Right now, that’s pretty much the situation with the climate footprint of most everyday consumer goods.

But let us back up and have a look at the basics first: Why is a climate footprint useful in the first place, how is it derived, and what does it have to do with individual consumption? In this post, we will go into the basics of what a climate footprint is, how it is about more than just carbon dioxide, and why it is a useful means to think about our impact on the climate. We will also see that our individual decisions present lots of opportunities for meaningful action in the way of successfully fighting the climate crisis. Considering all this, we can then understand why our climate footprints have to become a part of our everyday lives. So let's dive right in!

What does a climate footprint express?

The notion of the 'footprint' as a concept to think about the impact of someone or something on the environment dates back to the early 90s, when researchers William Reese and Mathis Wackernagel developed the 'ecological footprint'. While the ecological footprint is expressed in land use, the climate footprint describes greenhouse gas emissions. What's handy about the footprint is that it can be scaled to refer to very different things; this is how we might end up talking about the footprint of our toothbrush, our family, or, say, the entire country we live in. To be sure, determining these footprints requires different strategies, but the unit of measurement stays the same: mass of carbon dioxide equivalent or CO₂e for short.

Let's take a brief technical dive: The 'equivalent' in the unit already suggests that it includes multiple things. In fact, the Kyoto Protocol defines six types of greenhouse gasses: carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), nitrous oxide (N₂O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and sulfur hexaflouride (SF₆). The different properties of these gasses (i.e. how long they stay in the atmosphere and how potent their warming effect is) require setting them into relation—at least if we wish to only use one unit of measurement. This is achieved by means of the global warming potential of the gasses, typically looking at said potential over 100 years (GWP₁₀₀ for short). With CO₂ playing the major role for the greenhouse effect, it becomes the reference and therefore its GWP₁₀₀ is defined as 1. Methane, being a more potent greenhouse gas, has a GWP₁₀₀ closer to 30, meaning that an amount of methane in the atmosphere heats it about 30 times as much as the same mass of carbon dioxide would over 100 years. So while 1 ton of CO₂ works out as 1 ton CO₂e, 1 ton of Methane translates to roughly 30 tons CO₂e. That's how the climate footprint can encompass other greenhouse gasses apart from carbon dioxide.

Which emissions are included?

So much for the way the climate footprint expresses climate impact. But what does it include? Typically, whenever a 'footprint' is mentioned, it's meant to be as comprehensive as possible. Let us look at the example of driving a car. Everybody knows that burning fuel releases CO₂ into the air – and that's of course part of our car ride's footprint. This is an example of so-called direct emissions. But what about the indirect emissions 'embedded' in the product? In our example, that's the entire fuel production and distribution. Because the oil extraction and its refining, as well as the product transport, all use energy, they cause greenhouse gas emissions. So does the operation of the petrol station you end up buying from. That's why a footprint perspective will take these indirect emissions into account. And what about our cars? They are made from tens of thousands of parts and all kinds of resources from all across the world. Every time we drive them, we use up some of their overall lifetime, so we include a small fraction of their production emissions as well. If a car is driven for a total of 200,000 km, a 1,000 km ride would after all have required a 200th of its considerable overall production emissions.

Minding all these different elements and connecting them with the end product we use is at the heart of footprint thinking. And while collecting the necessary data can be a challenging – at times even daunting – task and has its limits, it plays an important role in ditching current practices in favour of more sustainable ones by enabling informed decisions.

Why we actually make a difference

At this point we might wonder: "Why should we care about our individual footprint, though?" And that's certainly a good question to ask. After all, taken on their own, how could our personal actions make a difference when it comes to the climate? Here, it's important to realise two things: firstly, in line with footprint thinking, that a majority of our economic activities ultimately enable our individual consumption of goods and services. This is how our consumption is directly linked to the greenhouse gas emissions of those economic activities. Secondly, that individual emissions work much like, say, tax payments: individual payments won't make or break a country's finances, but the sum of the payments still makes up the state's entire tax income. In the same way, if we add up the emissions our consumption causes, we end up with very nearly all the emissions there are.

Let's make this more concrete with some numbers: In 2018, the consumption-based CO₂ emissions¹ of most industrialised nations² totalled 13.0 Gt or 35.6 % of global CO₂ emissions (at 36.4 Gt). If these nations were to cut their emissions in half, this would mean a reduction of 6.5 Gt or 17.8 % of 2018's overall CO₂ emissions.³ Especially for developed nations, this would be doable as we are talking about emissions from lifestyle consumption that – in contrast to subsistence-level consumption in low-income countries – could actually be cut. That’s why straightforward everyday choices like cycling more, getting green energy and eating less meat can have an incredible impact if they become the new normal.

How is this still not a major thing?

Now that we better understand how useful and important the climate footprint is, we might begin to wonder why it's still not playing a bigger role in our everyday lives. As we have already discussed in the beginning, we can find online climate footprint calculators that require a lot of tedious manual input and/or remain frustratingly vague. But wouldn't it be interesting to find a climate footprint on each product, the same way they provide, say, nutritional information? The reason why this isn't happening is because it's not yet required by law. Since climate accounting costs money and its results don't necessarily blend well with a company's public image, there's litte incentive for the average company to print its products' footprints on them for us to see. That's not to say that there isn't any information available: Companies have had their supply chains and products assessed for decades, and governments collect plenty of statistical information that's freely available. The challenge is to make this information accessible and useful for us as everyday consumers.

This, in essence, is what eco.income set out to achieve with its climate footprint solution. It's become increasingly clear that we can't afford to wait for our governments to come around and push meaningful, effective legislation anytime soon. And while we absolutely need governments to urgently fight the climate crisis, we also need to fight it right now. So instead of waiting, let's get started ourselves. The team at eco.income is passionate about creating a science-driven, enabling tool for all of us.

Footnotes

1. Unfortunately, the numbers were only available for CO₂. However, they still makes up around 75% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
2. EU-27 (except CZ), CH, NW, UK, US, CA, JP, KR, AU, NZ.
3. Numbers taken from Our World in Data.

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