On the one hand, the calculation is straightforward: take how much fuel a plane burns and how many greenhouse gases are emitted during the course of a flight and divide by the number of passengers. It isn’t easy to calculate a carbon footprint indeed, Berners-Lee calls it the “essential but impossible” measurement.Ĭonsider, for example, the personal carbon cost of taking a commercial flight. The “average American takes just a couple of days to match the annual footprint of the average Nigerian or Malian,” he writes. However, that figure is approximately 13 tons for the average Briton and roughly 21 tons per person in the United States. In his book, Berners-Lee writes that the average global citizen has a carbon footprint that is equivalent to the emission of seven tons of carbon dioxide per year. Unsurprisingly, in general terms the size of a person’s carbon footprint tends to increase with wealth. Both their footprints may pale in comparison to the businesswoman across the street, who flies first-class cross-country twice a month. A person who regularly consumes beef will have a larger food footprint than his vegan neighbor, but that neighbor’s overall footprint may be larger if she drives an hour to work and back in an SUV each day while our meat-eater bicycles to his office nearby. So, what exactly is a carbon footprint? According to Mike Berners-Lee, a professor at Lancaster University in the UK and author of The Carbon Footprint of Everything, it is “the sum total of all the greenhouse gas emissions that had to take place in order for a product to be produced or for an activity to take place.”įor most consumers in developed countries, these products and activities tend to fall into four principal categories: household energy use, transport, food, and everything else, which is mostly the products we buy, from utensils to clothes to cars to television sets.Įach of these activities and products has its own footprint a person’s carbon footprint is the combined total of the products they buy and use, the activities they undertake, and so on.

But while the concept is gaining traction-Googling “How do I reduce my carbon footprint?” yields almost 27 million responses-it is not always fully understood. One way to gain a quantifiable understanding of the impacts of our actions, for good and bad, is through what is known as a carbon footprint.

It can be hard to make a connection between our everyday lives and the survival of polar bears, let alone how we as individuals can help turn the situation around. But the scale of the problems it causes-from wildfires to melting glaciers to droughts-can seem utterly overwhelming. As awareness of climate change grows, so does the desire to do something about it.

Carbon footprint quiz