Our first 12 months!

It is 12 months since we launched the Carbon Calculator.

Those of you who have created a carbon record will receive an email around your 12 months anniversary inviting you to update your records for the current year. Once you have done this, you will be able to see your household's progress in reducing your footprint.

When reviewing the data, we identified a number of incomplete carbon records. We urge you to return and complete your carbon profile. You can access the calculator at this link.

The most effective way to change your household carbon footprint is by understanding the profile of your emissions and sequestration. You may be surprised at what your major contributors are. We have pulled together a data set which incorporates those households that look to have entered a complete set of data. While it is relatively small (around 400), we suspect that it is a reasonable reflection of many kiwi households emissions. You can see the breakdown of those emissions in the chart below.

The average emissions per household were 14,817 kg which extrapolated to 5,688 kg per person. Food or dietary preferences represents the biggest single contributor to emissions.

An objective of the trust is to encourage households to reduce their emissions to the equivalent of 2,500kg per person. If we can achieve a 10% reduction each year we should hit this target by 2027!

While we have collected sequestration data; based on property size, 47% of the properties were larger than the traditional 1/4 acre urban section. Those larger properties tended to have higher emissions but overall were more than offsetting these through sequestration. For the smaller urban households the reverse applied. Once of the most effective ways to offset your footprint is to plant trees. Trees sequester carbon at the annual rates of: large = 675kg (> 5m in height), medium = 227kg (2-5m) and 8kg for those under 2m. If planting around your house is not a possibility, join a public planting day.

We are looking forward to the next 12 months to see if we can achieve at least a 10% reduction in the emissions which would take our average emissions per person down to 5,120kg.

We would also love to hear your stories. How you have been able to achieve reductions in your emissions? If you have tips to share with us please contact us by email.