My Global Impact
I finally got round to catching up on some magazine reading at the weekend and came across an article in the Autumn ’08 Tearfund TearTimes magazine highlighting their ‘My Global Impact’ scheme. They have an online calculator which figures out your carbon shoe size and then suggests an amount for a donation based on the size of your carbon footprint so that you can help protect the world’s poor from the worst effects of climate change.

The cynic in me wonders if that can be used as a cop-out to forget trying to reduce your carbon impact and just pay money to make yourself feel better. But at the end of the day that’s just the cynical viewpoint and making a contribution specifically to support those in poverty who suffer the most from the effects of climate change can only be a good thing. The calculator takes into consideration your gas and electricity consumption (don’t know what you do if you use oil for heating and not gas!) and stuff like annual car mileage, flights etc.

I was appalled to find that my carbon footprint for this year was an astronomical 20.8 tonnes of CO2 per year including:
Household emissions: 0.1
Transport: 16.5
Consumption & waste: 4.2

I think I’d thought that seeing as I cycle to work most of the time I could afford a little smugness. Not so! Mind you I guesstimated my annual car mileage to be 12,000 and I don’t actually think since I’ve moved to Belfast my annual mileage is as high as that anymore, it might be more like 10,000 but that’s still a considerable amount. The fact that I had 2 trips to Wales this year plus 3 trips to the USA does not help either. What’s worse is that the global ‘fair share’ of carbon output is 4.3 tonnes based on every inhabitant of planet earth emitting an equal allowance of carbon dioxide per year. The figure suggested for donation based on my results was £313.50 which seems like a lot and I can’t do that in one whack before Christmas. So I guess I need to get to work on reducing my carbon impact - cut down my car usage and get more energy efficient lightbulbs etc (Tearfund list some helpful tips to help reduce emissions here).

I've found this a really interesting exercise to do. It’s easy to rant and rave about climate change and about how we need to change but this calculator really brings it home and makes it personal! Check it out, the Tearfund website is full of good info!