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