Now that you know your emissions - start planning on how to reduce them

We have recently added a planning tool to our carbon calculator. You can access it from the first page of the calculator. Click the blue button labelled "Planning".

The resulting page displays your current carbon emissions (based on the data that your have already entered) as a horizontal bar graph. The largest category (in kilograms of carbon) is displayed as the top bar. In my case - it was food followed by travel.

If you click on one of the bars, a detailed breakdown of how your emissions were generated will appear below the bar chart (image below). In my case I have decided that I will see what happens if I chose to stop overseas travel so I clicked the "travel" bar.

The travel detail that I originally entered in the calculator is now displayed. To the right of that current activity is a slider (black) which is currently set at my entered activity levels. In my case (below) you can see 4 domestic flights and 4 flights to Asia.

My total emissions (12,924 kgs of Co2e) are displayed. By moving the black slider to the proposed level of activity the reduction (or increase) in carbon emissions is calculated. If I was to eliminate my air travel I would achieve a 28.6% reduction in my total carbon emissions, down to 9,231kg (image below).

Using my data as an example, I checked out some of of the reductions that I will or could achieve:

• Energy: I am already a low energy user so there is little scope to improve on that.

• Travel: As mentioned above, if I cut out current flights I could reduce my emissions by 28.6%. Maybe I need to consider more domestic adventures - at ground level.

• Food: I am currently eating meat twice a week - I could try to reduce that to 1 day a week - that would achieve a 17.3% reduction.

• Transport: I recently replaced my old vehicle with a fully electric vehicle. In another year all of the kilometres travelled will be by EV and this will reduce my emissions by 36%.

• Waste: Reducing my waste by 50% would deliver a 9% reduction in total carbon emissions. This will require a bit of thought. As a family we will need to rethink how we shop and look for options with less packaging - we should be doing that anyway but it will be a 'slower burn' in terms of achieving that and impacting on our footprint.

If you are looking for some ideas on actions that you could take have read of this article by Lindsay Jeffs - it contains around 33 suggestions.