Community carbon footprint tool launched 

The aim of Impact is to give small communities (parishes and towns) data on their carbon emissions that is easy to understand, easy to share, and which gives them a clear idea of their main ‘impact areas’ – those places where focused community-based action can make the biggest contribution to cutting local emissions. 

The tool has been designed with a simple user interface and dynamic visual representation of data that’s easy for a layperson to interpret. 

It uses two different but complementary approaches to carbon footprinting: territorial-based reporting and consumption-based reporting. Both look at where our emissions come from, but they calculate this in different ways. 

A  territorial  footprint looks at all emissions that arise from activities within a particular boundary, covering for example road and rail travel, industrial and commercial emissions and agriculture, and household energy use. The consumption footprint also looks at household energy use, but it differs from the territorial approach in that it considers the behaviours and the purchases of the people living in that area, including goods and services, much of which are imported from outside - like food, clothing, banking and medical services. Both approaches can provide useful information to help target local action. 

 Visit the Impact website to access the carbon footprint tool. 

Example output of the tool on the impact website