Why Calculate Your Carbon Footprint?
Understanding what contributes to your carbon emissions is both fascinating and powerful. By calculating your carbon footprint, you have the knowledge to plan how and where you can make changes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. All the Actions on our website can help you with this plan!
Very ambitious and comprehensive actions are called for by the goal stated in the Climate Emergency Declaration adopted by the September 2020 Acton Town Meeting: to “bring net Town-wide carbon emissions to zero as quickly as possible, with a target date of 2030.” This EnergizeActon.org website will help you prioritize the Actions that yield the greatest reductions. Or, alternately, the Actions can help you understand which changes are most manageable at the moment. Many of the Actions include an estimate of the degree of emissions reduction the Action can achieve on average. These emission reductions can be compared with your current emissions to see how much progress you can make.
How To Calculate Your Carbon Footprint.
One of the most trustworthy and used carbon calculators is the so-called Berkeley Calculator created by the CoolClimate Network. Households and businesses can enter their consumption of electricity, fuels, foods, etc. and the calculator shows how many tons of CO2 that represents, and how you stack up against similar households or businesses.
You will see that the calculator is not limited just to emissions from energy use, nor to the emissions counted in the 2022 Acton Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory, most of which were from energy use and limited to “Scope 2” emissions (essentially, emissions from your own activities). The calculator can show you that your purchases of goods and services also cause substantial additional carbon emissions — including emissions at the locations where goods are manufactured and packaged, and food grown. Calculating your current emissions with the Berkeley Calculator will give you important information about your impacts and help you participate in discussions of Acton’s future carbon accounting and climate action.
We’ve used quite a few of the Berkeley Calculator’s principles and estimates in our website data. You will also see the Berkeley Calculator on this website under the “Tools” tab. Under this tab, you will also find the Climate Goals Tracker, which gives some feedback about our progress as a community.