As Britain moves towards net zero by 2050, every company, organisation and institution needs to take responsibility for its carbon emissions and come up with a plan to reduce them. The first step is to measure them, and set a baseline against which to measure progress.
Personal carbon footprint calculators are common and there are lots to choose from, despite the mixed legacy of the individual approach*. Institutions are more complicated and many have had to call on specialist support, but it’s getting easier all the time to find sector specific help.
In the last couple of weeks the first carbon calculator for schools was launched. It’s called Count your Carbon and it’s been designed by Keep Britain Tidy, along with Eco-Schools and partners. It simplifies the process of working out where carbon emissions come from at a school, and breaks it down into the categories of energy, water and waste, transport, food and drink, and purchases. This gives schools really useful information to create their climate action plan, which all schools are expected to deliver in the near future.
I’ll be using Count your Carbon in my own work with schools, and I’m mentioning it for the benefit of any readers in an educational setting who might want to use it.
I’m also interested in what other sector based carbon calculators you might have come across. If there’s one you’ve used or heard of, let me know in the comments and I’ll compile a list.
*One the one hand, it’s important to understand how our own lifestyles contribute to climate change so that we can make informed decisions about our response. (Hint: it’s not about recycling.)
On the other hand, too much talk about personal carbon footprints obscures the wider systemic reasons why the atmosphere is warming. It places too much importance on individuals and not enough on systems. That’s why one of the first groups to build an online carbon calculator was BP. Their involvement is sometimes overstated – they didn’t invent carbon footprints. But they did spot the opportunity to frame the climate debate around individual action, and they hired the PR company Ogilvy & Mather to help them do it.
The Earthbound Report 