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How to Calculate Your Ecological Footprint
My eighth grade daughter is doing her science project on ecological footprints and steps kids can do to help reduce it. She wants to be able to survey her eighth grade class using pertinent questions then take the answers and determine their and their family's footprint. As part of the response she will provide ways to reduce it. What she is needing is a way to calculate the footprint. I realize it is based on asking the correct question. We have seen many quizzes that you go through and the output is the footprint. None of them show how to arrive at it. Is it a guarded secret? Since this is 8th grade she only needs a good base of questions to ask and a way to arrive at the footprint. Can you be of assistance? if not do you have a recommendation?
She is working on a web page as the interface and would like to customize and use something similar to what you have.
Thanks for your time.
She is working on a web page as the interface and would like to customize and use something similar to what you have.
Thanks for your time.
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Inappropriate?Hi Charles
Just to add to Jackie's response...
As far as I know it all gets pretty complex.
There is a PDF document here that (kind of) shows how footprints are calculated:
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/image...
And in there, *i think* it is the "CLUMS" that are used as the main basis for how our impacts are measured.
It doesn't provide the full full-on data sheets that are used to arrive at the footprint results, but I believe these are huge (huge) bundles of information.
I would say that the best people to contact about this would be these people:
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/in...
Sorry I can't be of more help right now, but I'll ask around in the office and see if I can find out anything in addition.
(And will report it here if I do).
cheers
ste1 Comment
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This answers the question
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I would have thought that in order to peak interest in the younger generation there would be something out there that kids could use, understand and expand on. Maybe that should be my daughters project... -
Inappropriate?You are absolutely right.
And to your suggested solution: I was also thinking this morning how the whole thing could be simplified... it doesn't have to be scientifically accurate, but more an indicator. One that can be easily used and adopted and most importantly spread around.
For example, you could have a scale of 1 to 10 - with 1 being the lowest impact and 10 the highest.
You could then assign different actions different points levels.
So
* cycling 2x a week to get somewhere is 1 point.
* driving every day is 10 points.
* eating meat less than 3x a week is 4 points
* eating meat every day is 8 points
They are simply be indicators.
So come up with enough questions (that you could just take from any footprint calculator), test with 3 or 4 people, score them, maybe tweak the points as you go, and you should find different levels appearing.
Then you could assign a traffic light indication of how big the person's footprint is based on how many points they get
Red: whoah, think again (> XXXpoints)
Green: nice going (<xx>re still (and always) learning.
cheers
ste
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