The Livewell diet for a healthier planet

Have you ever considered how your diet affects the environment? WWF UK has come up with Livewell diet to encourage people to take up a healthy diet for a healthier planet. How we eat is also a significant aspect when thinking of climate change: for example in the UK around one third of the CO2 emissions are related to food production.

Many of us would like to eat in a more environmentally friendly way, but the amount of information is often overwhelming. This time, the WWF and their research partners have tried to make it simple: they provide the readers with shopping lists and a weekly menu.


Picture from the Guardian.

More information: The Livewell report

Carbon Disclosure in cities

As it becomes more and more common for cities to actively mitigate and adapt to climate change, also the amount of commitments for cutting local carbon emissions increases. For monitoring and evaluating if these commitments are reached it is naturally important to track the carbon emissions of the cities. But is it clear how that is done?

The Carbon Disclosure Project has been tracking corporate carbon emissions and other climate information for years. Now they have asked 40 biggest cities in the world to come clean on carbon and publicly the carbon footprint of the cities, that include Delhi, London, Moscow, New York, Shanghai and Tokyo. The findings are planned to be released in May.

See more in the video about the Carbon Disclosure Project:


Find out more: Carbon Disclosure Project

Mapping global ecological footprint

A recently published Living Planet 2010 report by WWF shows that the Earth's population is using the equivalent of 1.5 planets' worth of natural resources and that biodiversity has fallen nearly 60% in low-income countries in less than 40 years. The report also states that carbon now accounts for over half the global ecological footprint. This somewhat depressing information should encourage us to find solutions and tools to halt the biodiversity loss and diminish our carbon footprint.

Luckily there are some good news, too. In non-tropical parts of the world, there’s actually been an increase in species numbers, by around 30% on average. This is due to greater conservation efforts and pollution control.

In this Ecological Footprint Index below you are able to search footprints by country.


The global average of the ecological footprint is three hectares, meaning the area required to provide the resources consumed by the population or average person in a year. The consumption of natural resources in the rich countries is on average five times higher than in the poorest countries.

More information: WWF Living Planet Report 2010

Carbon toe-prints or carbon footprints?

Nowadays, there's a lot of discussion about carbon footprints. One can choose the most climate-friendly diet, car or holiday destination by comparing the carbon footprints of various products and services. The term carbon footprint can be defined as "shorthand to describe the best estimate that we can get of the full climate change impact of something." It is possible to estimate the carbon footprint for anything: a service or a product, an item or an activity, a country or a municipality. Or for example for the 2010 World Cup: 2.8 million tonnes of CO2.

In CHAMP we are also trying to promote low carbon footprint project management. In the project most of the carbon emissions are produced by travelling. For this reason, we are aiming at reducing our carbon footprint mainly by using e-communication instead of having to travel. As we were calculating our emissions caused by travelling, it was quite interesting to see how far from each other the results of different carbon calculators were.

There are great differences between the many carbon footprint calculators one finds online, and sometimes it is hard to evaluate which calculator gives the most truthful answer. The results some of the calculators could even be called carbon toe-prints since many of them don't take into account all emissions or even miss out most of the emissions. If we take for example flying, a lot more information than just the distance to destination is needed. An accurate calculation is only possible if the type of the plane, number of the stops etc. are known. The same goes with direct and indirect emissions - they must both be noticed to calculate the true carbon footprint of something.

Many online carbon calculators are only rough estimates but can anyway give a conception of the total climate impact a certain activity or item has. It is almost impossible to measure a carbon footprint accurately, but at the same time it is an essential part of understanding the whole picture of climate change response.

Source: The Guardian
Picture: Footprint Designs