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What's Your Footprint?
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Have you noticed all
the online calculators that can help you determine your
environmental impact and come up with a personal plan of action?
Personally, we think you can come up
with a more meaningful plan in ten
minutes, without having to guess your electricity bill or
kilometres traveled. But, if you want to spend some time
with the online tools, here's a quick overview of the main
ones...
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The grand-daddy and getting better
all the time.
www.myfootprint.org is a global website that makes
adjustments for your country. It's easy to use, and it
will give you a nice chart at the end comparing your footprint
to the national average. It's also really depressing.
You have to be absolutely perfect, living in Canada, to score
under the threshold of one earth.
Free to use and no catches, other
than a polite request to support their work at the end.
Based on the ecological footprint,
the Nature
Challenge has been simplified over a number of years down
from ten actions to focus on four key priorities:
transportation, food, energy and public action. The
website includes a number of factsheets and you can sign up for
a monthly newsletter.
There is no actual calculator, or
pledge form. Clicking on "Take the Challenge" takes you to
a page where you enter your name, e-mail, and postal address,
and then to a page asking you to promote the challenge to your
friends. Use this one only if you want to help support the
excellent work of the David Suzuki Foundation.
Zero Footprint is an
organization that specializes in ecological footprint
calculators and carbon offsets.
They have developed numerous
applications of their calculator, including a one-minute
calculator, a personal carbon manager, and municipal calculators
(such as the one for
Live Green
Toronto).
Of course, being in the carbon
offset business, your footprint on the one-minute calculator is
shown in tonnes of CO2/year and you can offset your emissions at
a cost of $16.00 a tonne. Another calculator for Unilever
focuses on water consumption and presents the results in
litres/year. Full marks for creativity.
If you are looking to develop a
personalized calculator, these are the people for you.
World Wildlife Fund
Canada's entry into the world of online calculators is a
pledge-based campaign designed to build public support for their
policy work. It has an excellent list of actions and rates
each of them according to the potential reduction in your CO2
emissions. Each pledge you make is then entered into the
database and becomes part of the Canada-wide map participants,
pledges and savings. It's easy to use, informative, and
backed up with blogs and newsletters.
To use The Good Life, you are
required to enter your name, email and full address. WWF
says this is to ensure credible data and to demonstrate
individual commitment to action. This, in turn, they use
to strengthen their campaigns for stronger government
commitments and action on climate change.
Earth Day Canada
One of the first
major environmental groups to develop public outreach campaigns
and promote
voluntary
action, Earth Day Canada has developed an online calculator in
support of its neighbourhood
EcoAction team
program. Earth Day Canada is currently signing up
municipalities as partners in the program and will work with
them to set up local teams, or support groups.
The calculator
is divided into three sections, roughly progressing from simple
actions to deeper commitments and investments. At the end,
you will get a list of actions that you have committed to do,
and you can return and update your file at any time. To do
Level One, you need only enter your town and postal code.
To access Level Two and Three, you need to enter your e-mail
address and set up an account.
The
calculator is
based on a specific list of actions, with no flexibility.
It combines the assessment features of the ecological footprint
model with the a personal pledge list. The nice feature is that
it shows you your potential savings in water, waste, greenhouse
emissions, and dollars.
 Ontario
Ministry of the Environment
With a
high-priced
commercial
that debuted during the Olympics, the Ontario Ministry of the
Environment launched
Add It Up Ontario, a glitzy site with all the bells and
whistles including a walk-on host ("I'm a mom") that most people
turn off in under one minute. The online calculator takes
a long time to complete and is full of trivial questions, such
as "do you turn the taps off when you wash your hands?"
At the end, you get a report comparing what you do with what you
plan to do. You can also choose to make a pledge from a
set list, which then gets highlighted on a map of Ontario.
The best part of
the site is the list of government programs and subsidies that
can help you. And this, of course is the main purpose of
the site -- to demonstrate that the Province is helping people
conserve.
The
Bottom Line
You may have already figured
it out: most of these online calculators won't help you become a
better conserver. They're promotional and marketing tools. At
best, they will give you an idea of where you may want to
improve. It's the support services behind them that make
the difference.
If you just want to calculate your environmental impact, use
the Ecological
Footprint or
ZeroFootprint.
If you are developing a municipal program and want a
tailored calculator or outreach program, contact
Zero Footprint.
If you want to set up support groups or challenge your
friends, try
EcoAction Teams, the
David
Suzuki Nature Challenge, or
The Good Life.
If you want to calculate and offset your emissions, go to
Zero Footprint
(or see our page on personal carbon
offsets).
If you want to support the policy work of Canada's NGOs, go
to either The Good
Life, or the
David
Suzuki Nature Challenge.
But your best bet
for finding the groups, businesses and resources to help you
implement your conservation priorities is still right here with
our factsheets and online directories.
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