Any Research on Effect of 'Your Own Environmental Impact' Quizzes and Calculators?

One thing I can say is that many US carbon and CO2 calculators are quite sloppy about the relevant math. I did a small research project and found that calculators which rated high in Google searches offered estimates of the CO2 generated by burning 1 gallon of gasoline that ranged from 17.56 to 19.6 pounds. Variances were even worse for burning natural gas, electricity generation, and air travel. BUT, details aside, I think that awareness of Carbon Footprints is so incredibly low right now that anything we can do to raise awareness will help or do no harm. I simply can't imagine someone who, on learning how big an impact flying or driving has on their carbon footprint, decides to just start flying MORE or driving MORE. But I also believe that when people learn that their Carbon Footprint is very large they need to be given ideas for improvement that aren't just the easy to implement ones. We should help them envision a life with a 50% smaller footprint, not just a quick and easy 5% tune-up. I also think that, as Rob Hall suggested earlier, we need to compare the unfamiliar to the familiar. So if we tell someone that their Carbon Footprint is X tons of CO2, we also need to place that in context of the average adult's footprint in their country and in the world.

Best Regards,
Bruce Karney

[email protected]
+1 650 450-0332 (mobile)
+1 650 964-3567 (home office)
+1 650 903-0954 (fax)
833 Bush St.,
Mountain View, CA 94041 USA

Bruce and Stefan:

First comment as I think I have commented before on this list, I too believe there is a tremendous need for a definitive measure of CO2 equivalent calculations to be made available for common activities like travel. At the very least we need a critique of the available measures that exist. I did a quick search on trying to find out the underlying mathematics used but this did not yield a great deal. Two footprint measures I have used are the Earthday Quiz (http://www.earthday.net/footprint/index.asp) and the Sydney University Footprint Quiz (http://www.isa.org.usyd.edu.au/). Both of these finish up with a hectare measurement - the number of hectares required to sustain one's particular way of life. In the Earthday quiz one, the comparison is made on how many earth's this means if everyone lived in the same way. This is quite shocking as the if the average for Australia was used, it think it would mean that we would require 5 earths. Of course the scenario darkens if the average US citizen was used as the guide. The Sydney University guide gives the averages for Australia before one enters one's own data. A quick comment on your statement Bruce about not being able to imagine someone continuing with a profligate behaviour if they had the knowledge. Unfortunately I think that knowledge is simply not enough from my experience. Particularly with air travel. People are hooked on cheap air travel. They are also hooked on the need to maintain family ties no matter how widely spread those family members may be. At present in our local climate action group ( in which I would say there is a high degree of knowledge of footprint information about air travel) three separate families are away on long haul flights to visit family members.

Patrick

Patrick Forman
Technical Officer
School of Social Science and Liberal Studies
Charles Sturt University
Bathurst, NSW, Australia 2795
Tel: +61 2 6338 4087
fac: +61 2 6338 4401 

One problem with some calculators of carbon footprints is that they show the number of hectares of planet earth that is needed to compensate for our current carbon emissions. In turn, this assumes that the only way to reduce the size of the carbon or energy footprint is to plant trees or other woody perennial, long-lived vegetation. Geosequestration is now being seen as an alternative to this (only in some circumstances, however), while trials are underway (in Australia, for example) to see if farming practices can be modified to increase carbon storage in agricultural soils. As the world accepts the seriousness of the CO2 emission problem facing the planet, I'm confident that a wide range of additional methods of removing CO2 from the atmosphere is likely to be shown to be commercially and technologically feasible. In time, therefore, we'll have many more ways to reduce our carbon footprint than just planting trees.

Bernie

One very interesting response from Terry Cotter seems to make a strong case for a very careful approach to using self-monitoring in behaviour change - see the below. As an aside, Patrick and Bernie, I'd like to re-iterate that my question relates to the significance of using these calculators for the users, not so much the accuracy of the calculations. While I agree the science of them is also very important, for the purposes of behaviour change, my feeling is that what goes on 'underneath the hood' is secondary so long as it provides results the users find credible and relevant. Maybe this is a bit social constructivist of me, but there you go!

You may also want to visit:
http://conservationvalue.blogspot.com/2006/06/does-ecological-footprint-moti vate.html

Stefan and others

My experience within the various Council environmental groups in Victoria (Australia) is that they are floundering as to what are valid GHG savings and what calculators to use: often making up their own. I saw awhile ago on the Fostering Sustainable Behavior Listserv someone who had used 6 of the Googled most available calculators, fed in the same data and came up with a range of in excess of 50% (?) difference in some of the results. Additionally those writing reports of GHG savings seem to be more concerned to "get some figures into their reports" to show "they are doing something." Eg they show vehicle GHG savings but when queried, they say that it is only for fuel, even though whole of life GHG/energy savings may give a better result with another method/vehicle, but it is too difficult, or too much work to find out, let alone trust the reliability of the calculators. I wonder if we could develop some open source, standard type calculators that allow variables to be put in for local conditions (eg power transmission length, source type wind/coal etc) and then have the metric and British Standard conversion. (Too often the available calculators have hidden operating variables/items that can't be accessed to include local variations/factors or even to know what was used). These developed calculators could then be peer reviewed (much the same as the Linux operating system for computers) before being adopted for the next iteration of refinement. This would need to be done for the different calculators for power generation/supply; vehicles/fuels and then expanded for other demand items of reporting. The peer review may overcome the variability of existing calculators and develop a standard not only of calculated values for direct comparison but also make sure that as we are learning we are taking into account factors that are often overlooked as to giving GHG's which also smudges the results.

Regards,
Peeter Kallista
Environment Project Coordinator
Glen Eira City Council 

Hi Stefan

One article which may be of interest explores the issue of raising self-awareness of travel behaviour Psychological resistance against attempts to reduce private car use 

Gerard Tertoolen, Dik van Kreveld and Ben Verstraten Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice Volume 32, Issue 3 , April 1998, Pages 171-181  

Unfortunately the results are not very heartening, encapsulated by the following observation "When the discrepancy between attitude (environmental awareness) and behavior (car use) is pointed out, then apparently people are more likely to alter their attitude than their behavior, and they tend to excuse themselves for their behavior." That indeed seems to be the way with creating cognitive dissonance. When our behaviours don't match our attitudes, we have the choice of a) changing behaviour, b) changing attitude, or c) coming up with a rationalisation which allows both attitude and behaviour to live in (often deluded) harmony. Cognitive dissonance can be used to the advantage of change agents however. A 1992 study CHRIS ANN DICKERSON, Ruth Thibodeau, Elliot Aronson, Dayna Miller (1992) Using Cognitive Dissonance to Encourage Water Conservation Journal of Applied Social Psychology 22 (11), 841-854. got college students to make a public commitment to saving water, then provided feedback on their own water wasting. This forced "hypocrisy" resulted in a reduction in shower times. The key seemed to be in the public commitment - people had invested some of their identity in being a certain type of person, which is a more harder construct to shift than a mere private attitude. I guess this could be applicable to online calculators through linking them to a certain commitment. Maybe a "sign up to this pledge" prompt before completing the calculator?

Good luck
Tim Cotter

AWAKE
56 Bloomfield Rd,
Ascot Vale, Melbourne, VIC 3032, Australia
Tel: (+61 3) 9370 0273
Fax: (+61 3) 9370 0276
Mobile: (+61) 0404 212 903
Email:

Hi All,

Bernie has raised an important point about being too 'tree-happy' in relation to GHG sequestration (although of course trees have multiple benefits besides acting as C02 sinks): One problem with some calculators of carbon footprints is that they show the number of hectares of planet earth that is needed to compensate for our current carbon emissions. In turn, this assumes that the only way to reduce the size of the carbon or energy footprint is to plant trees or other woody perennial, long-lived vegetation. Just to clarify, the FAQs from the 2006 Living Planet report (p38-39) produced by the Global Footprint Network (GFN www.footprintnetwork.org) the organisation that maintains the national EF accounts for 150 countries, states: 'The sequestration rate used in Ecological Footprint calculations is based on an estimate of how much carbon the world's forests can remove from the atmosphere and retain...The CO2 footprint does not suggest that carbon sequestration is the key to resolving global warming. Rather the opposite: it shows that the biosphere does not have sufficient capacity to cope with current levels of CO2 emissions. As forests mature, their CO2 sequestration rate approaches zero, and they may even become net emitters of carbon.' This theoretical component of the Ecological Footprint (ie. 'how much bigger would the planet need to be to soak up all the anthropogenic carbon and keep a stable climate?') was chosen for the GFN methodology, as it is actually calculated as being less of a Footprint than growing crops which would provide the equivalent energy of fossil fuels: 'Estimates of the land required to produce biomass energy equivalent to fossil fuels yield similar, but larger, Carbon Footprints than the waste assimilation approach.' (2006 Living Planet Report - Technical Notes www.footprintnetwork.org/download.php?id=307).

Cheers,
Sharon 

Hi Peeter,

My experience within the various Council environmental groups in Victoria (Australia) is that they are floundering as to what are valid GHG savings and what calculators to use: often making up their own. I wonder if we could develop some open source, standard type calculators that allow variables to be put in for local conditions You could do worse than study "The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists" by Michael Brower and Warren Leon. Three Rivers Press, 1999. 304 pp. Price: $15 (US). I can recommend it. This is a comprehensive look at the full range of modern consumer activities, identifying those that cause the most environmental damage and those that cause relatively little. The authors carry out a comparative risk analysis in as much detail as is feasible, pointing out clearly the inevitable uncertainties at various stages. Obviously some adaptation is needed for individual cases; for example, using less paper may not rate very high in terms of one's environmental footprint if one lives in or near a city, but when it's a question of a rural institution of one (or several) hundred people which has to truck its "recycle" paper a long way then the Footprint begins to grow importantly, especially since the book identifies fossil-fuel transport as one of the most 'damaging' elements of modern living from many angles. The website is: http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/

Happy reading!
Elizabeth Griffin
(Victoria, Canada)