Households stepping up for climate action

It may be just a regular July for you, but at Enviro-Mark Solutions it’s our end of financial year. This year we were involved in some particularly exciting discussions in our local communities.

We’ve been helping individuals to understand their own carbon footprint; when you know where your carbon emissions come from, you can take steps to manage and reduce. To support this, and as part of our mission to inspire action for a better environment, we provide free tools for individuals and families to measure their carbon footprint.

It has been a real pleasure to connect directly with so many enthusiastic and engaged people across the country. So, with this in mind, we compared the activity through our household calculator over the last financial year (July 2018 to June 2019), specifically the number of carbon credits purchased, with the results from the previous financial year.

What fantastic news! This year, individuals purchased carbon credits worth 1,795 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO₂e). That’s equivalent to taking over a thousand cars off the road this year*.

Even better, it is six times the number of carbon credits purchased in the previous financial year, where we saw only 275 tCO₂e offset.

Whilst this is a small amount in the grand scheme of things, this is a clear signal that more people are engaging on this issue and find it important to reduce their impacts right now. This is incredibly promising given what know around the urgency of acting on climate change.

We need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to stay within 1.5^oC of warming (see the IPCC report for the full picture). This is very ambitious, given our worldwide reliance on fossil fuels and will take efforts from all of us to meet it – government, business and individuals – and clearly people want to step up.

“We’re encouraged to see that more people are using the calculator to understand their footprint and choosing to offset their impact now and work on ways to reduce, given the current urgency to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions”, says Dr Ann Smith, CEO of Enviro-Mark Solutions.

“Choosing to offset your footprint by purchasing carbon credits through the household calculator, means you are investing in real and meaningful projects that avoid, reduce or store carbon emissions that would have otherwise been released into our atmosphere. Some of those projects are developing wind or solar farms, or providing communities in need with efficient cooking implements, and they often have wider health and economic benefits to the community itself, beyond reducing carbon emissions.”

If you haven’t yet measured your footprint, what are you waiting for?

We promise it’s easy. Just grab a few of your recent bills and jump on the calculator – it’ll step you through. There’s heaps of advice to help you work on reducing your carbon emissions at each step. There’s also the optional choice to offset your footprint then and there, whilst you work on bringing down your emissions.

In our own business, we’ve been working on a range of ways to reduce our own impact. We’ve got more staff commuting on their bikes than ever before, our auditors have been able to schedule audits together to reduce the number of trips, and our Board of Directors are using the household calculator to measure and offset their own footprint!

If you have already measured your own household footprint – nice one! Tell your family, tell your friends, tell your colleagues, tell your employer, tell your local councillor, tell your national representative, tell everyone! Get measuring, managing and reducing and let’s see if we can make an ever bigger dent in carbon emissions than before.

* average emissions of one medium petrol engine per year