The other day I booked a flight and was asked if I would like to “carbon off-set”. One-way flights for 2 from Adelaide to Perth would create 0.508 tonnes of CO2-e emissions, which I could offset by paying $4.84.
I agreed. But was it just a lurk to get me to pay more? How does the offset scheme work? The airline calls it flying carbon neutral.
According to Choice magazine, carbon offsets are sold as a way for consumers and businesses to reduce their environmental impact. By buying an offset, you pay to support projects that remove greenhouse gases (GHGs) like carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or stop them getting there in the first place. When too many GHGs build up in the atmosphere, the result is climate change.
Our carbon emissions are just part of our ecological footprint. NOVA Science in the News is a resource published for schools by the Australian Academy of Science. This month’s unit of work for teachers and students is titled Making our mark - ecological footprints. As always a key text explores and defines the topic, there are links to useful sites, a glossary of terms, and activities students can undertake.
Resources like these are not just for science teachers. They contain information that teachers can use with students in a variety of ways and in a range of lessons. We should be using resources like these in science, social science, literacy, and ICT lessons. New NOVA topics are posted on the site regularly and you can receive notification by email.
Back to the carbon footprint though.
Here is what the NOVA article says:
Excluding the unproductive hot and cold deserts, our planet has about 11 billion hectares of land which are ‘biologically productive’. If we divide that by our planet’s current population of about 6.7 billion, about 1.6 global hectares is available for each of us.
But when we come to calculate what we need to live as we do, the answer comes out rather larger. Averaged across the planet, our footprint per person is about 2.2 global hectares. That suggests our planet is already oversubscribed and we are in trouble.
The average footprint hides wide diversity. For big-consuming nations like Australia, the footprint is 6 global hectares or more, while citizens of the poorest nations need less than a single global hectare. According to researchers at the University of Sydney, affluence has a major effect on the ecological footprint: the more we spend, the bigger the footprint.
South Australia’s ecological footprint is 7.0 global hectares per person and a chart for 2001 shows us 5th in the world, only narrowly behind the Australian average of 7.7. The only countries ahead of Australia were the United Arab Emirates, the United States of America and Kuwait.
One of the links provided is a place where I can calculate my ecological footprint.
This is what mine looked like. Something I need to do a bit of thinking about…
On Bigfoot, I didn’t do any better….
3 Comments
I won’t be buying any carbon offsets. I am environmentally quite sound - the only exception is my lying all over the place, but even that I think creates a net carbon reduction (because I am working toward the development of online learning).
As for the online tests, I found I was unable to make it register that I do not own a car - and so i was charged for my non-existent car’s emission - and neither did it take into account basic simply living, the fact that I don’t buy silly gadgets, over-processed food, etc etc.
that would be flying, not lying, of course - my natural thrift extends to using a keyboard beyond its useful life
That should make your letter f last a lot longer Stephen :-)
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[…] The article that came to me by email today is called Flying beyond our means - air travel and the environment. A couple of months ago I wrote about the carbon offsetting programme one of the airlines offered me. […]
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