Our goal is to achieve a zero carbon footprint for everyone on our planet.
It is a dream, but not an unfeasible one.
Everything we do in modern life has a carbon footprint, and this carries a very high cost to our environment. It is responsible for global warming, and if it isn’t drastically cut our planet’s heating process will escalate until it becomes irreversible. Our enormous carbon footprint has become the characteristic of our modern times and it is not a model of sustainability.
It hasn’t always been like this. Human activity has gone on for centuries with negligible carbon emissions, and it is only in the last century that our carbon footprint as a species has escalated to astronomical levels.
But, is it truly inevitable?
Much of our carbon footprint is avoidable. Cutting down unnecessary consumption is one way to do this; using greener choices such as public transport, low-energy bulbs and minimising the consumption of transport-intensive goods will also contribute to reduce your carbon footprint.
It is even possible for an individual or a business to achieve a zero carbon footprint. We do not need to give up modern life to achieve this. We can rely on improved technologies to help us produce greener electricity and a low-carbon economy. By recycling and through sensible choices in our consumption we can minimise our footprint. What remains of it can only be completely cancelled out through carbon offsets.
The average person in the UK emits about 11 tonnes of CO2 in a year. It takes roughly about 11 fast-growing trees at a tropical latitude over a tree’s lifetime of about 40-50 years to offset that amount of carbon. Given that the UK population is 60.9 million (as of 2008), one would need to plant about 670 million such trees every year to make the United Kingdom a completely zero footprint country. Tree planting on such a vast scale would bring fantastic benefits to the global environment, in addition to completely eliminating our carbon footprint.
That would be the ideal to aim for, although it is extremely ambitious. It certainly is not impossible. It is very feasible to carry out tree planting and reforestation on a very large scale. There is no shortage of tropical land where this can be done. At a market value of £7 per tonne offset, the financial cost of making the UK zero carbon footprint per annum would be £4.7bn (as of 2008).
We can all contribute towards that goal by eliminating our own individual carbon footprint. A zero footprint individual doesn’t do without the comforts of modern life, but has a net zero carbon footprint by offsetting their estimated carbon footprint.
We have tried to show how this can be calculated in our carbon footprint calculator. The section my life shows how to offset all carbon emissions in your life, and to compute how much you need to offset on an ongoing basis in order to continue cancelling your carbon footprint.