Our Footprint represents the overall effect our lifestyles, individually and collectively, are having on the earth: this compares to the ‘carrying capacity’ of the systems that sustain our lives. This footprint includes the effect of carbon and other pollutants, and other impacts on land and the ecosystems that actually sustain our lives, providing so many vital services for free.
What are our biggest areas of impact? What actions are most effective and achievable? The answers may well surprise us! An effective Emergency response starts with understanding these basics, and organising for action – we can’t do it alone, but combined we can do a lot!
There are some great new tools at http://carbonsavvy.uk that link your carbon footprint and wellbeing. Start with the 1-minute or 5-minute versions, but the 45 minute version would actually be a fantastic investment of your time!
www.footprintcalculator.org is a simple but informative tool to find your Ecological footprint – this relates all our activities to the area of our planet that’s needed to support them. There’s also a short link for this: tiny.cc/ecofp. This is all part of One Planet Living, which Oxfordshire County council have signed up to as a framework.
What can we do to improve? This document lists some ‘Significant yet Accessible’ actions you could take: tiny.cc/tcnactionlist
One very basic action is to switch your electricity to a 100% sustainable supplier. Visit BigCleanSwitch.org to easily find the sustainable supplier that’s most affordable for you. Switching isn’t very hard to do!
You can find more useful information in this document and yet more in this shared folder