Ecological Footprint Calculator

...link via Derek Sherwood

Ever wonder how much your carbon and ecological footprint really is? Now from the Center For Sustainability, you can take this quick quiz that asks you questions about daily habits. Everything from food, to housing, to travel. It seems to be a a pretty good estimator of where we stand, and helps to show you where you stack up against the rest of your country.

Here is the link:

Ecological Footprint Quiz

I took the quiz in about ten to fifteen minutes and here are my results:

My carbon footprint is 68.45 global acres and the average American's is 91.43. My food footprint is 38.46 global acres compared to the average American's of 65.74. My housing footprint is 16.61 global acres compared to the average American's of 31.58. My goods and services footprint is 16.98 versus the average American's of 57.66 global acres. I found these numbers to be interesting. Living in a fourplex and my home garden helped a lot with these footprints. Overall my global acres consumption is 140.5 global acres versus the country average of 246.61. Also, for those that are interest in what exactly a global acre is, here is what I found at FootprintNetwork:

global hectare (gha) : A productivity weighted area used to report both the biocapacity of the earth, and the demand on biocapacity (the Ecological Footprint). The global hectare is normalized to the area-weighted average productivity of biologically productive land and water in a given year. Because different land types have different productivity, a global hectare of, for example, cropland, would occupy a smaller physical area than the much less biologically productive pasture land, as more pasture would be needed to provide the same biocapacity as one hectare of cropland. Because world bioproductivity varies slightly from year to year, the value of a gha may change slightly from year to year.

Interesting stuff indeed. What did you score? Share with us and lets see what we can do together to reduce our numbers!

---Justin J. Stewart (link via Derek Sherwood)