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Carbon footprint calculation

Carbon footprint reduction.

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• Global Footprint Network - Climate Change: Carbon Footprint
• UCAR - Center for Science Education - What's Your Carbon Footprint?
• University of Michigan - Center for Sustainable Systems - Carbon Footprint Factsheet
• Environmental Protecion Agency - Carbon Footprint Calculator
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• Energy Education - CO2 footprint
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• Frontiers - Methodological introduction to the carbon footprint evaluation of intermodal transport
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carbon footprint , amount of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions associated with all the activities of a person or other entity (e.g., building, corporation, country, etc.). It includes direct emissions, such as those that result from fossil-fuel combustion in manufacturing , heating, and transportation , as well as emissions required to produce the electricity associated with goods and services consumed. In addition, the carbon footprint concept also often includes the emissions of other greenhouse gases , such as methane , nitrous oxide , or chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

The carbon footprint concept is related to and grew out of the older idea of ecological footprint , a concept invented in the early 1990s by Canadian ecologist William Rees and Swiss-born regional planner Mathis Wackernagel at the University of British Columbia . An ecological footprint is the total area of land required to sustain an activity or population . It includes environmental impacts, such as water use and the amount of land used for food production. In contrast, a carbon footprint is usually expressed as a measure of weight, as in tons of CO 2 or CO 2 equivalent per year.

Carbon footprints are different from a country’s reported per capita emissions (for example, those reported under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). Rather than the greenhouse gas emissions associated with production, carbon footprints focus on the greenhouse gas emissions associated with consumption . They include the emissions associated with goods that are imported into a country but are produced elsewhere and generally take into account emissions associated with international transport and shipping, which is not accounted for in standard national inventories. As a result, a country’s carbon footprint can increase even as carbon emissions within its borders decrease.

The per capita carbon footprint is highest in the United States . According to the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center and the United Nations Development Programme , in 2004 the average resident of the United States had a per capita carbon footprint of 20.6 metric tons (22.7 short tons) of CO 2 equivalent, some five to seven times the global average. Averages vary greatly around the world, with higher footprints generally found in residents of developed countries. For example, that same year France had a per capita carbon footprint of 6.0 metric tons (6.6 short tons), whereas Brazil and Tanzania had carbon footprints of 1.8 metric tons (about 2 short tons) and 0.1 metric ton (0.1 short ton) of CO 2 equivalent, respectively.

In developed countries , transportation and household energy use make up the largest component of an individual’s carbon footprint. For example, approximately 40 percent of total emissions in the United States during the first decade of the 21st century were from those sources. Such emissions are included as part of an individual’s “primary” carbon footprint, representing the emissions over which an individual has direct control. The remainder of an individual’s carbon footprint is called the “secondary” carbon footprint, representing carbon emissions associated with the consumption of goods and services. The secondary footprint includes carbon emissions emitted by food production. It can be used to account for diets that contain higher proportions of meat, which requires a greater amount of energy and nutrients to produce than vegetables and grains, and foods that have been transported long distances. The manufacturing and transportation of consumer goods are additional contributors to the secondary carbon footprint. For example, the carbon footprint of a bottle of water includes the CO 2 or CO 2 equivalent emitted during the manufacture of the bottle itself plus the amount emitted during the transportation of the bottle to the consumer.

A variety of different tools exist for calculating the carbon footprints for individuals, businesses, and other organizations. Commonly used methodologies for calculating organizational carbon footprints include the Greenhouse Gas Protocol , from the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and ISO 14064, a standard developed by the International Organization for Standardization dealing specifically with greenhouse gas emissions. Several organizations, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency , the Nature Conservancy , and British Petroleum , created carbon calculators on the Internet for individuals. Such calculators allow people to compare their own estimated carbon footprints with the national and world averages.

Individuals and corporations can take a number of steps to reduce their carbon footprints and thus contribute to global climate mitigation. They can purchase carbon offsets (broadly stated, an investment in a carbon-reducing activity or technology) to compensate for part or all of their carbon footprint. If they purchase enough to offset their carbon footprint, they become effectively carbon neutral.

Carbon footprints can be reduced through improving energy efficiency and changing lifestyles and purchasing habits. Switching one’s energy and transportation use can have an impact on primary carbon footprints. For example, using public transportation , such as buses and trains, reduces an individual’s carbon footprint when compared with driving. Individuals and corporations can reduce their respective carbon footprints by installing energy-efficient lighting, adding insulation in buildings, or using renewable energy sources to generate the electricity they require. For example, electricity generation from wind power produces no direct carbon emissions. Additional lifestyle choices that can lower an individual’s secondary carbon footprint include reducing one’s consumption of meat and switching one’s purchasing habits to products that require fewer carbon emissions to produce and transport.

Carbon Footprint: Concept, Methodology and Calculation

• First Online: 03 December 2020

Cite this chapter

• Flavio Scrucca 3 ,
• Grazia Barberio 3 ,
• Valentina Fantin 3 ,
• Pier Luigi Porta 3 &
• Marco Barbanera 4  

Part of the book series: Environmental Footprints and Eco-design of Products and Processes ((EFEPP))

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Carbon footprint (CF) is nowadays one of the most widely used environmental indicators and calculations of CF have been recently in very high demand. Many approaches, methodologies and tools, from simplified online calculators to other more scientific and complex life-cycle based methods, have been developed and are available for estimations. CF evaluations are, in general, focused on products and organizations, but calculation approach have been developed also for specific themes/sectors, such as for instance cities, individuals, households, farms, etc. This chapter is aimed at giving an updated and comprehensive overview on the concept of CF, and also on methodologies, technical standards, protocols and tools for its calculation. Attention is focused on the two main and usual scopes of CF assessment, i.e. products and organizations, but also on other relevant specific study subjects, also discussing methodological differences and issues.

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Scrucca, F., Barberio, G., Fantin, V., Porta, P.L., Barbanera, M. (2021). Carbon Footprint: Concept, Methodology and Calculation. In: Muthu, S.S. (eds) Carbon Footprint Case Studies. Environmental Footprints and Eco-design of Products and Processes. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9577-6_1

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• ENVIRONMENT

What is a carbon footprint—and how to measure yours

Determining a carbon footprint is easier said than done, and it’s not clear how much weight we should put on it.

As awareness of climate change   grows, so does the desire to do something about it . But the scale of the problems it causes—from wildfires to melting glaciers to droughts—can seem utterly overwhelming . It can be hard to make a connection between our everyday lives and the survival of polar bears, let alone how we as individuals can help turn the situation around.

One way to gain a quantifiable understanding of the impacts of our actions, for good and bad, is through what is known as a carbon footprint. But while the concept is gaining traction—Googling “How do I reduce my carbon footprint?” yields almost 27 million responses—it is not always fully understood .

What is a carbon footprint?

So, what exactly is a carbon footprint? According to Mike Berners-Lee , a professor at Lancaster University in the UK and author of The Carbon Footprint of Everything , it is “the sum total of all the greenhouse gas emissions that had to take place in order for a product to be produced or for an activity to take place.”

For most consumers in developed countries, these products and activities tend to fall into four principal categories: household energy use, transport, food, and everything else, which is mostly the products we buy, from utensils to clothes to cars to television sets.

Each of these activities and products has its own footprint; a person’s carbon footprint is the combined total of the products they buy and use, the activities they undertake, and so on. A person who regularly consumes beef will have a   larger food footprint than his vegan neighbor, but that neighbor’s overall footprint may be larger if she drives an hour to work and back in an SUV each day while our meat-eater bicycles to his office nearby. Both their footprints may pale in comparison to the businesswoman across the street, who flies first-class cross-country twice a month.

Unsurprisingly, in general terms the size of a person’s carbon footprint tends to increase with wealth. In his book, Berners-Lee writes that the average global citizen has a carbon footprint that is equivalent to the emission of seven tons of carbon dioxide per year. However, that figure is approximately 13 tons for the average Briton and roughly 21 tons per person in the United States.; The “average American takes just a couple of days to match the annual footprint of the average Nigerian or Malian,” he writes.

How is a carbon footprint calculated?

It isn’t easy to calculate a carbon footprint; indeed, Berners-Lee calls it the “essential but impossible” measurement.

Consider, for example, the personal carbon cost of taking a commercial flight. On the one hand, the calculation is straightforward: take how much fuel a plane burns and how many greenhouse gases are emitted during the course of a flight and divide by the number of passengers. But the footprint is larger for first-and-business-class passengers, because they take up more space and because their higher cost creates an extra incentive for the flight to actually take place. Other considerations include how much cargo the plane is carrying, and the altitude at which the plane flies .

Even so, it is a relatively simple calculation compared to assessing the emissions involved in every step of, say, the manufacture of a car: the emissions that take place at the assembly plant, the generation of electricity to power that plant, the transport of all the component items, the factories at which the components were made, the creation of the machinery used at those factories and at the assembly plant and so on, all the way back to the extraction of the minerals that are the car’s building blocks.

Because of the complexity involved in such calculations, Berners-Lee concedes that in such cases it is “never possible to be completely accurate.” The good news, he argues, is that for most individuals, that doesn’t matter. “Usually, it’s good enough just to have a broad idea,” he says.

What steps a person can take to reduce their personal footprint the most of course depends on the kind of lifestyle they presently live, and the same actions are not equally effective for everyone. For example, switching to an electric car is far more impactful in Vermont , where more than half the state’s electricity is generated by hydropower, than in West Virginia, where it is almost entirely generated by coal. Berners-Lee notes that, “for some people, flying may be 10 percent of their footprint, for some people it’s zero, and for some it’s such a huge number that it should be the only thing they should be thinking about.”

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A cornucopia of calculators.

To that end, in recent years, a veritable cornucopia of personal carbon footprint calculators has emerged online. By entering information about your household energy use, food consumption, and travel habits, for example, these calculators aim to provide you with an approximation of the amount of greenhouse gases being emitted to support your way of life. This one from the Nature Conservancy focuses on home energy use, transportation, diet, and shopping; this, from the United States Environmental Protection Agency , also considers transportation and energy use but adds in waste—specifically, how much you recycle. It also enables you to calculate how much your footprint could be reduced by taking steps such as insulating your home, driving less, or procuring a more fuel-efficient vehicle. This one shows just how much of an idealized personal carbon budget is taken up by consuming two large cheeseburgers a month or spending two nights in a hotel.

Are carbon footprints just fossil fuel propaganda?

It has been claimed that the earliest such calculator appeared in 2004 as part of the “ Beyond Petroleum” campaign of oil giant BP —a fact that causes some observers to criticize the pressure to reduce personal carbon footprints as a “sham” to “promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals.”

“A few years ago, Shell promoted a tweet into my thread that asked, ‘What are you doing to reduce your carbon footprint?’” recalls Katharine Hayhoe , chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy and a professor at Texas Tech University. “So, I replied with something along the lines of, ‘You are responsible for 2 percent of global emissions, equivalent to the entire country of Canada; when you have a plan to get rid of those, I’d be happy to talk to you about my personal carbon footprint.’ And they hid my reply.”

“It’s really important that all of us think about what we’re consuming, whether it’s fish or furniture or air conditioning: where it came from, what impact it had,” says Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigations Center . “But industry then turned it around and made it: ‘It’s not our fault, you’re using our product. You deal with it.’”

That is all the more egregious, he argues, given that the fossil fuel industry has directly fought to limit some of the measures that are often cited as ways for people to reduce their personal carbon footprints: more fuel-efficient vehicle standards, or clean energy technology , for example.

“If not for fossil fuel companies, you would already be driving an EV, your house would be more efficient to run if industry hadn’t blocked solutions and obscured the truth about the urgency of addressing climate change ,” Davies adds.

Do carbon footprint calculators have a role?

Hayhoe argues that there are other problems with the concept of personal carbon footprints, not least the fact that many of the proposed means to reduce those footprints are unavailable to those who, for example, don’t have access to public transport, or can’t afford the upfront cost of an electric car or a heat pump, or who live in food deserts , where healthier, lower-impact foods such as vegetables and grains are harder to come by.

“There’s a role for the personal carbon footprint concept in high income countries among middle-to-high income people,” she explains. “There’s a very big role for the personal carbon footprint among the very richest people in the world . But we have to realize it is a limited concept—it does not apply to everyone.”

In addition, she argues, acting by ourselves is just one small part of what is required to affect change in a system that, despite the best individual efforts, remains dominated by the production and use of fossil fuels.

“I would say personal carbon footprint calculators are a useful tool to assess the impact of your immediate actions: where you live, where you travel, what you eat,” she says. “But what’s much more important than your personal carbon footprint is your climate shadow . Where do you keep your money? How do you vote? What about the businesses you work with, or the university you’re a part of, or the Rotary Club of which you’re a member—what are they doing, and how could you advocate for change?

“So, in a nutshell, when people ask me what they should do, I say: Do something, anything, but then talk about it. The only way to bring the carbon footprint of everybody in rich countries to where it needs to be for a sustainable planet is to change the system, and to change the system we have to use our voice.”

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What's Your Carbon Footprint?

How much carbon dioxide do you send into the atmosphere? Anytime you do something that requires fossil fuels — like riding in a car, flying in a plane, buying something, eating something, or even just watching TV — you emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Our individual carbon dioxide emissions are a part of the total emissions on Earth. All of the cars and trucks that we drive, the boxes we ship, the products we manufacture, the emissions from the food we eat, the air-conditioning we use in our buildings — it all adds up.

Some people emit much more carbon dioxide than others. Worldwide, the average person produces about four tons of carbon dioxide each year. In the United States, each person produces about 16 tons of carbon dioxide each year. Because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas , adding more of it to the atmosphere causes our climate to warm .

Driving a car that burns gasoline releases much more carbon dioxide than carpooling or taking public transportation, so driving makes your carbon footprint larger than other transportation choices. Ride a bike or walk instead to shrink your carbon footprint even more.

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Calculate Your Carbon Footprint

You can figure out how much your actions affect greenhouse gases by using a carbon footprint calculator. A carbon footprint is the total amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere as a result of human activities. Your carbon footprint is the total carbon dioxide released due to your individual activities. Your household’s carbon footprint is the total carbon dioxide released by your home and all the people who live there. A carbon footprint calculator typically takes into account the greenhouse gases you produce at home and while traveling. It can also include the greenhouse gases produced to transport and make the food you eat and the things you buy.

Check out the carbon footprint calculators listed below and use one to calculate your carbon footprint:

• CoolClimate Calculator : This in-depth calculator adds up your carbon emissions from home, travel, food, and shopping. It allows you to compare your footprint to others and helps you identify the changes you can make to reduce your impact on climate change.
• Zerofootprint Youth Carbon Calculator : This kid-friendly calculator guides you through the process of calculating your family’s carbon footprint. You don’t need a login or email address, but you must name your school and birthday to use the tool.
• EPA Household Carbon Footprint Calculator : Gather your home energy bills before you start for the most accurate calculation of your home’s carbon emissions. This calculator includes home energy, cars, and recycling, but doesn’t include other types of emissions. It includes helpful information about how much carbon dioxide you can save by making small changes around your house to decrease your impact on climate change.

Shrinking Your Footprint

Once you have calculated your carbon footprint, think about how you could make it smaller. We add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere as we go about our daily lives, but often we can make choices that reduce these emissions. For example, you might choose to ride a bike to the store rather than driving a car. Or you might find that renewable energy is available from your power company and make a switch. By reducing your carbon dioxide emissions, you will shrink your carbon footprint, and your choices will help keep the climate livable. The choices we make every day in our homes, our travel, the food we eat, and what we buy and throw away can help ensure a stable climate for future generations.

Catrin Jakobsson, with data from  Wynes and Nicolas (2017)

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Introduction:, concept of carbon footprints:, classifications of carbon footprints:, overview of ghg protocol scopes and emissions, methods of carbon footprints:, assessment standards for carbon footprints:, carbon footprint reduction and mitigation:, conclusion:.

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What is a carbon footprint?

From cooking a pot roast to jetting away for the weekend, the choices you make in your day-to-day life leave a mark on the environment.

A carbon footprint is a simple way to express that impact. The “size” of your carbon footprint depends on multiple factors. The primary one is the amount of greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere by a given activity.

People, products and entire industries have carbon footprints. Your personal footprint includes emissions from a variety of sources — your daily commute, the food you eat, the clothes you buy, everything you throw away ... and more. The larger your footprint, the heavier the strain on the environment.

To halt climate breakdown and avoid its worst impacts, we need to do two things: shift to a low-carbon economy and protect our best natural allies in the fight against climate change — forests, grasslands, mangroves and tidal marshes, which stash away large quantities of carbon.

Drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions will require, everyone — from individuals to industries to countries — to vastly reduce their carbon footprint. Here’s the information and practical steps you’ll need to get started.

How is a carbon footprint measured?

A carbon footprint estimates the total emission volume of greenhouse gases — those gases in our atmosphere that trap and release heat, and contribute to climate change.

While the measurement actually accounts for the release of a number of different world-warming gases — like methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases — results are typically expressed in terms of carbon dioxide equivalency (for example: 5 tons of CO 2 -equivalent). The CO 2 -equivalency measurement enables straightforward, apples-to-apples comparisons of activities, events or industries that might otherwise be difficult to compare directly.

The life-cycle assessment

While a carbon footprint focuses on greenhouse gas emissions, a life-cycle assessment looks a broader environmental impacts. Think of a life-cycle assessment as a "cradle-to-grave" measure of all of the energy and materials used to develop and operate the product or service.

Take a car, for example. A comprehensive life-cycle assessment would take into account all phases of the vehicle's life, including the sourcing and processing of raw materials used in production, assembly at the manufacturing facility, transfer to the showroom and the eventual scrapping of the vehicle when its days are done. And that's before factoring in the impact of regular maintenance and the fossil fuels burned while driving the car over the course of its life.

How does carbon affect climate change?

Carbon dioxide traps heat emitted by both the sun and the Earth's surface — and releases that heat into our atmosphere. As we burn fossil fuels and cut down forests, high concentrations of greenhouse gases, specifically carbon dioxide, threaten to raise the average surface temperature of the planet to intolerable levels — and cause a host of life-threatening impacts.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen more than 40 percent since the middle of the 18th century, and climatologists estimate that current levels are as high as they've been in some 14 million years.

As carbon dioxide levels continue to climb, fueling further temperature increases, the cumulative effects — including increased ocean acidification, rising sea levels, more frequent and intense storms, mass species extinctions, food scarcity and greater economic inequality — will be felt worldwide.

By the numbers

A lot of hot air.

Around the world, the average person generates 4.8 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year. In the United States, it's more than three times that number — 16.2 metric tons. In fact, the U.S.’s per capita carbon footprint is larger than that of most nations, including Canada (15.64 t), Russia (11.76 t), Germany (9.73 t), Japan (9.45 t), China (6.98 t), UK (5.81 t), France (5.48 t), Brazil (2.27 t) and India (1.84 t).

Your carbon footprint

So if the average person worldwide is responsible for emitting the equivalent of nearly five metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, where does it all come from? Truth is, dozens of daily actions — and long-term lifestyle choices — shape each of our carbon footprints. Here are five of the most significant contributors:

Family size: If you’re a parent, no single factor contributes more to your carbon footprint than the number of children you have, with each child adding an average of 58 tons of CO 2 -equivalent per year to your total.

Transportation: Cars and planes are the culprits here. Owning and regularly driving a car adds an average of 2.4 tons of CO 2 -equivalent to your yearly footprint, while just a single transatlantic flight adds 1.6 tons.

Heating and air conditioning: Regularly heating and cooling your home adds roughly 1.5 tons of CO 2 -equivalent to your annual footprint. That’s because most American homes are still powered by "dirty" energy sources such as coal and gas instead of renewable sources like solar and wind. Here’s how different energy sources stack up: A typical coal power plant produces about 870 grams of CO 2 per kilowatt of power (while plants outfitted with carbon-capture tech, which captures waste carbon and stores it underground, pump out about 156 grams). Consider some alternatives: Natural gas produces about 464 grams of CO 2 per kilowatt of power; for solar, it's 48 grams of CO 2 ; and for wind, it's a breezy 11 grams.

Food: Eating meat adds about 0.8 tons to your annual carbon footprint. This has less to do with emissions produced directly by the animals themselves and more to do with the energy required to grow and harvest the crops that feed the livestock. But not all meats are created equal: Beef requires a lot more feed, water and land than chicken, and therefore accounts for an additional 880 pounds of CO 2 -e emitted per year.

Laundry: Merely washing and drying your clothes adds about 0.46 tons of CO 2 over the course of a year — 0.25 tons due to heating the water for the wash cycle and another 0.21 tons from drying your clothes.

Put your best foot forward

The first step to reducing your environmental impact is to measure your current carbon footprint. Our carbon footprint calculator can help you find out just where you stand — or use it to gauge the impact of your entire household, a special event or your next vacation. Then, learn how you can offset your emissions by contributing to carbon projects that create financial incentives to protect, conserve and restore forest ecosystems — while supporting local communities around the world.

Calculate your footprint

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What lifestyle changes will shrink your carbon footprint the most.

How to take steps that will make a difference

You can reduce your carbon emissions, but the most influential changes will depend on your circumstances.

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By Christie Aschwanden

May 14, 2020 at 6:00 am

Three years ago, Kim Cobb was feeling “completely overwhelmed” by the problem of climate change. Cobb spends her days studying climate change as director of the Global Change Program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, but she felt paralyzed over how to be part of the solution in her personal life. The barriers felt immense.

She decided to start small. On January 1, 2017, she made a personal climate resolution: She would walk her kids to school and bicycle to work two days a week. That change didn’t represent a lot in terms of carbon emissions, she says, “but it was a huge lesson in daily engagement.”

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In the beginning, her modest goal seemed daunting, but she quickly discovered that the two simple activities nourished her physical and mental well-being. She wanted to do them every day. “It’s no longer for the carbon — it’s for the fact that I genuinely love riding my bike and walking my kids to school,” she says. And that made her wonder: What other steps was she thinking of as sacrifices that might actually enrich her life?

A November 2019 survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication suggests that Cobb isn’t alone in her worries about climate change. Fifty-eight percent of the U.S. residents surveyed were “alarmed” or “concerned” about global warming. Cobb has turned her concern into action. It’s not too late to reduce the damage caused by global warming, but it will take drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, says Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown , a San Francisco–based nonprofit research organization that identifies ways to reduce carbon emissions.

To keep global temperatures from rising too quickly, we need to re-engineer our society away from fossil fuels. A 2015 study calculated that to rein in warming, about 80 percent of global reserves of coal, 50 percent of natural gas reserves and 33 percent of the world’s oil must be left unused.

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We can’t get to drawdown, the point at which levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere start to steadily decline, with one easy fix, Foley says. Action is required on multiple levels — government, industry and individuals — and across multiple systems, including energy, transportation, housing and food. We need to do all of the things, says Foley, whose organization has identified more than 80 climate “solutions” available now. These range from renewable energy technologies to plant-based diets to mass transit. “To get to drawdown, we need them all,” Foley says.

When it comes to the changes that individuals can make, “the most effective thing that you can do depends on your specific circumstances,” says Christopher Jones, director of the CoolClimate Network at the University of California, Berkeley. His group has produced maps that estimate a household’s carbon footprint based on ZIP code and lifestyle.

The graphics below, based on CoolClimate Network calculations , will help you find your biggest levers for cutting emissions, which for U.S. households are, on average, the equivalent of 48 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.

Each action shows the tons of carbon dioxide equivalent saved per year:

Relevant assumptions are shown in italics.

Transportation

How you get where you’re going is one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, and the size of your transportation emissions usually depends on where you live, Jones says. City dwellers have more access to public transportation, while people in the suburbs tend to drive a lot more. For people who drive long distances, getting the most fuel-efficient car, a hybrid or an electric, may be the best way to curb emissions. Carpooling when possible, combining trips and leaving the car home once a week also help.

Action: Replace a 25 mpg car with …

An electric car.

A hybrid car (55 mpg)

A fuel-efficient car (40 mpg)

Assumption: Driving 12,000 miles per year

Action: Alternate commuting alone in a car with …

Carpooling two days/week.

Telecommuting five days/month

Assumptions: Car gets 25 mpg, commute is 25 miles round trip, carpool with one other person

Action: Replace 25 miles of driving per week with …

Assumption: Current car gets 25 mpg

Taking the bus

Assumption: Bus is diesel engine

Action: Practice “eco-driving”

Reduce rapid acceleration and braking and reduce top cruising highway speed from 70 to 65 mph.

Assumption: Driving 12,000 miles per year, fuel economy 25 mpg

Action: Change air filters regularly and keep tires properly inflated

These two actions raise efficiency by 3 percent each

If you fly, there’s a good chance that aviation emissions are your biggest lever. Once people can travel again, consider vacationing closer to home and look for alternatives to business travel, such as videoconferencing. Take ground transportation instead of flying whenever possible. When flying can’t be avoided, take the advice of Dan Rutherford, shipping and aviation director at the International Council on Clean Transportation: Fly like a NERD. Choose a New(er) aircraft; book Economy class; take a Regular, medium-sized plane instead of a less-efficient small regional or jumbo jet; and select a Direct flight.

Action: Eliminate one round-trip cross-country flight per year

Assumption: Based on approximate round trip from New York to San Francisco

The average U.S. home uses three to four times the electricity of a European one, Foley says. That’s mostly due to inefficient appliances and lighting and insufficient insulation. Those are all things that homeowners can address. Installing solar panels takes a big chunk out of your emissions. But if panels are too costly or just not feasible, purchasing renewable energy from a clean energy provider can offer the same emissions savings. Though options, like installing solar panels, are only available to people who own their home, there are plenty of other things that both renters and owners can do.

Action: Change your source of electricity

Purchase green energy from a clean energy provider.

Install solar panels at your home

Assumptions: Household uses 10,700 kilowatt hours of electricity per year and 100 percent of electricity comes from a clean energy provider or from solar panels

If home improvements are in your budget, go for optimized insulation, weather stripping and energy-efficient windows and appliances. Install thermostats that adjust the temperature based on when you’re home and awake. And, of course, bigger houses take more energy to heat, cool and light, plus more space means more stuff. “The majority of emissions regarding shelter come from the stuff you buy,” Jones says. If downsizing is an option for you, it’s worth considering.

Action: Replace 10 incandescent lightbulbs with LEDs

Assumption: Lights are on five hours per day

Action: Reduce your trash output by 20 percent

Assumption: Household throws out 0.5 cubic yards of trash a week

Action: Turn off the lights when not in use

Assumption: Shut five lights at 40 watts each for four hours per day

Action: Turn the thermostat …

Down 5° f in winter.

Up 5° F in summer

Assumptions: Home is about 1,850 square feet, heated with electricity

Action: Put desktop computer in sleep mode nights and weekends and turn off monitor during those times

Assumption: Remember to do this 50 percent of the time

Action: Install low-flow showerheads

Assumptions: Household takes two showers per day for eight minutes each; savings comes from heating water.

Action: Plant five trees in your yard

Assumptions: Some of the savings comes from reduced AC use as the result of shade from the trees.

Action: Line dry two loads of laundry per week

Assumptions: Machine-drying four loads of laundry uses 690 kilowatt-hours of electricity

The biggest lever to cut food emissions is to stop producing more food than we need. The United Nations estimates that the annual carbon footprint of global food waste is 4.4 gigatons of CO 2  equivalent. Americans, specifically, waste about 25 percent of the food we buy. According to Project Drawdown, adopting a vegetarian diet can also cut emissions, by about 63 percent, while going vegan can reduce them by as much as 70 percent. Agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, and meat and dairy production are the big contributors. Even cutting back on animal products can make a difference.

Action: Cut five servings a week of …

Beef, pork, lamb.

Other (processed meats, nuts …)

Poultry and eggs

Fats, oils, sugar and processed foods

Do individual choices matter?

When Cobb looked at her carbon footprint, she found that flying represented about 85 percent of her emissions. So she joined a community of people on Twitter who resolved to fly less, and she committed to cutting her business and personal flights by 30 percent. With the group’s support, she dropped another 30 percent the next year, but it wasn’t always easy. Her pledge didn’t make her many friends within the academic community initially. But the goal of flying less has become more mainstream, at least among her colleagues, as she’s shown it can be done.

“It started as an individual action,” she says, but her decision to forgo certain work travel created new opportunities for virtual conferences and other flying alternatives for her colleagues, too. “It has transformed into a collective-scale action to shift cultural norms,” Cobb says.

Social influence can drive change, says Diana Ivanova, a research fellow at the School of Earth and Environment at University of Leeds in England who reviewed emissions reduction options in April in Environmental Research Letters . If you see other people taking steps to shrink their carbon footprints, “you may feel more empowered to enact changes yourself.”

Researchers call this transmission of ideas and behaviors through a population “behavioral contagion.” That’s where individual action can be a potent force for change, says Robert Frank, a Cornell University economist. “Installing solar panels, buying an electric vehicle or adopting a more climate-friendly diet don’t just increase the likelihood of others taking similar steps, it also deepens one’s sense of identity as a climate advocate,” Frank writes in his 2020 book, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work . Those actions can also encourage other meaningful actions, like supporting candidates who favor climate-protecting legislation.

Some of the most significant action is happening at state and local levels. Your mayor and city council have a lot of power to reduce the community’s carbon footprint, says Cobb, who found herself getting more involved with each success. She was elected traffic chair of her neighborhood board in 2017 and is now working on improving biking infrastructure to make cycling safer for everyone.

Individual actions can create ripple effects, says ecological economist Julia Steinberger of University of Leeds. Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg helped spread awareness about aviation emissions, and now overnight train lines between European cities are reopening. “It wasn’t a big industry-wide decision or government regulation. It was a bunch of people deciding, we don’t want to fly anymore,” Steinberger says.

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• Published: 12 August 2020

The carbon impact of artificial intelligence

• Payal Dhar   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0916-8171 1  

Nature Machine Intelligence volume  2 ,  pages 423–425 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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The part that artificial intelligence plays in climate change has come under scrutiny, including from tech workers themselves who joined the global climate strike last year. Much can be done by developing tools to quantify the carbon cost of machine learning models and by switching to a sustainable artificial intelligence infrastructure.

In 2018, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s award-winning visual map and essay , titled ‘Anatomy of an AI system’, demonstrated the impact of an artificial intelligence (AI) device on a global scale in terms of human labour, data and resources that are required during its lifespan, from manufacture to disposal, using Amazon’s Echo as an example. At every level, wrote the authors, contemporary technology is deeply rooted in the exploitation of human bodies. Starting from extracting metals from the Earth and the resulting environmental effects, to the sweatshops of programmers that keep the system going, to the personal data about the user that the device gathers, they offered a visual picture of AI’s impact on the environment and human rights.

It has become an urgent matter to consider the role of AI technology in the climate crisis. The United Nations has called climate change a “defining crisis of our time”, and, according to the Climate Reality Project , 97% of climate scientists concur that human activity is its main driver. The key mitigation pathways to avoiding a global environmental catastrophe include bringing emissions to zero by the middle of the twenty-first century, and limiting the average global warming to 1.5 °C. Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, this was deemed an eminently achievable goal should we act now; however, the pandemic is likely to have caused long-term implications that aren’t yet clear.

AI seems destined to play a dual role . On the one hand, it can help reduce the effects of the climate crisis, such as in smart grid design, developing low-emission infrastructure, and modelling climate change predictions. On the other hand, AI is itself a significant emitter of carbon. This message reached the attention of a general audience in the latter half of 2019 when researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst analysed various natural language processing (NLP) training models available online to estimate the energy cost in kilowatts required to train them. Converting this energy consumption in approximate carbon emissions and electricity costs, the authors estimated that the carbon footprint of training a single big language model is equal to around 300,000 kg of carbon dioxide emissions. This is of the order of 125 round-trip flights between New York and Beijing, a quantification that laypersons can visualize.

But the carbon cost of training large machine learning models like the ones in the UMass study is only part of the problem; for a full picture, closer attention needs to be paid to the carbon impact of the infrastructure around big tech’s deployment of AI. Last year saw tech workers urging their employers to recognize their part in the climate crisis. Thousands joined the global climate strike in September 2019 to raise attention to big tech’s collaboration with fossil fuel companies and its part in the repression of climate refugees and frontline communities. Employees of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and others, organizing as the Tech Workers Coalition , marched to demand from their employers a promise to reduce emissions to zero by 2030, to not have contracts with fossil fuel companies, to stop funding climate change deniers, and to stop the exploitation of climate refugees and frontline communities.

Need to quantify

A main problem to tackle in reducing AI’s climate impact is to quantify its energy consumption and carbon emission, and to make this information transparent. Crawford and Joler wrote in their essay that the material details of the costs of large-scale AI systems are vague in the social imagination, to the extent that a layperson might think that building a machine learning (ML)-based system is a simple task. Part of the enigma lies in the absence of a standard of measurement.

Alexandre Lacoste and colleagues worked on a study to make quantifying the carbon cost of ML easier for researchers. The emissions incurred in the training of a neural network model, they found, are related to the location of the training server and the energy grid it uses, the length of the training procedure, and the hardware on which the training takes place. They developed an emissions calculator to estimate the energy use, and the concomitant environmental impact, of training ML models. Alexandra Luccioni, a collaborator on that study, says that keeping an eye on the emissions level of AI is crucial for the near future. “This is definitely something that people are working [on], be it via more efficient GPUs [graphics processing units] or by buying renewable energy credits for the carbon that was produced by neural network training. Using renewable energy grids for training neural networks is the single biggest change that can be made. It can make emissions vary by a factor of 40, between a fully renewable grid and a fully coal grid.” However, to make AI less polluting, she adds, it needs to become more of a mainstream conversation, including “getting researchers to divulge how much carbon dioxide was produced by their research, to reuse models instead of training them from scratch and by using more efficient GPUs.”

The actionable recommendations from the UMass team are similar — for example, the authors encourage researchers to prioritize computationally efficient hardware and algorithms, to report training time and sensitivity to hyperparameters in published performance results, and to perform a cost–benefit analysis of NLP models for comparison.

A 2018 analysis led by Dario Amodei and Danny Hernandez of the California-based OpenAI research lab, an organization that describes its mission as ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, revealed that the compute used in various large AI training models had been doubling every 3.4 months since 2012 — a wild deviation from Moore’s Law, which puts this at 18 months — accounting for a 300,000× increase. This directly corresponds to the advances seen in the AI industry in recent years. While algorithmic innovation and data — two other factors directly related to the growth of AI — are difficult to quantify, compute isn’t. But, they wrote in their blog post, the nebulousness of the exact amounts of compute can and does just as easily function as a fig leaf to hide the shortcomings of current algorithms.

Roy Schwartz and collaborators, in a position paper published in mid-2019, called this trend ‘red AI’, that is, ‘buying’ stronger results by using massive compute. For a linear gain in performance, an exponentially larger model is required, which can come in the form of increasing the amount of training data or the number of experiments, thus escalating computational costs, and therefore carbon emissions. To demonstrate the prevalence of red AI, Schwartz et al. analysed over 60 papers from top conferences and concluded that a vast majority — 90% of papers from the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 80% from the 2018 Conference on Neurological Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), and 75% from the 2019 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition — prioritized accuracy over efficiency.

Their study enumerated three factors making AI research red: the cost of executing the model on a single example; the size of the training dataset, which controls the number of times the model is executed; and the number of hyperparameter experiments, which controls how many times the model is trained. The total cost of producing a result in ML, they said, increases linearly with each of these quantities. Overall, the increasing trend towards neural architecture search (NAS) and automated hyperparameter optimization (also called autoML ), which are extremely heavy on compute, contribute substantially to red AI. In their paper, Schwartz and colleagues advocate for ‘green AI’, which they defined as “AI research that yields novel results without increasing computational cost, and ideally reducing it”, opposite to red AI.

Despite all this, red AI can still be valuable. In pushing the limits of model size, dataset size and the hyperparameter search space, even if a massive amount of resources is required, this may still pay off in terms of downstream performance. Justin Burr, communications manager for Google AI, says, “Training better models can actually save more energy over time. For example, NAS can find very efficient models. Given the number of times they’re used each day for inference, in less than a week they save more in energy than the old hand-tuned versions.”

Into the grid

AI scientist Richard Sutton, often called the ‘father of reinforcement learning’, wrote a blog post in early 2019 titled ‘The bitter lesson’, saying that AI methods that leverage computation are better and more accurate than those that leverage human knowledge. This mindset divides the AI industry, but what is indisputable is that relying on increasing amounts of compute and data requires ever-increasing power and other infrastructure, which is directly proportional to a rising carbon footprint. For a full grasp of AI’s carbon impact, it is not enough to scrutinize the compute costs incurred by training large models.

With tech companies reticent about sharing data, and having no incentives to do so, any attempt at quantifying emissions remains difficult. Roel Dobbe of the AI Now Institute at New York University says that this has led to a peculiar kind of complexity. The aggressive pace with which the computer industry has globalized and consolidated to a few players has challenged many societies’ ability to retain control over critical infrastructure.

“For the computing infrastructure to be effective and efficient in terms of being able to offer compute across the globe, data centres have to be built regionally. [But with the] market mostly dominated by three American players, they are building data centres not just in their own countries, but across the world. And this has various impacts.” One of these, he goes on to say, is the need for the right checks and balances, including regulations, to retain some form of local agency over these infrastructures. “These companies also invest a lot of money in alarming lobbying against regulation and other mechanisms that balance against their own power.” This also raises other questions. With so few players dominating the industry, how does that impact the price of compute? What are the strategies that other players might employ who do not necessarily care about or have to adhere to more stringent requirements for their energy mix?

Companies are hesitant to share data about their energy mix. Greenpeace’s Clicking Clean report from 2017 says that many companies who had committed to a 100% renewable future are more in a state of status quo than on a transformational path — in fact, despite net-zero-by-2040 pledges, Amazon’s emissions increased by 15% last year. The report also points out that despite a drive towards renewable energy in significant markets, in others there has been a concomitant push for fossil-fuel-based energy. One such example is Virginia, USA, the data centre hub of the world, where only 1% of electricity comes from renewable sources. Then, there is the nexus of Big Data with Big Oil, the report says. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Royal Dutch Shell and many others market their AI solutions to companies that work on fossil fuel extraction and use.

Estimating the carbon footprint of AI technologies, says Dobbe, should be fairly straightforward. “It’s hardware that’s running and we know how many operations various algorithms need to run.” He compares tech to the aerospace industry, where it is quite easy to track emissions: “We know the energy efficiency of planes because there are standards and there are reports about what hardware planes use, how far and how long they fly, et cetera… We need to get to a similar point for the computing industry, not just for data centres, but also for the rest of the network infrastructure. It is mostly a matter of political will and consumer awareness to enforce similar kinds of transparency.”

“I think that more tax incentives should be given for cloud providers to open data centres in places with hydro or solar energy,” says Alexandra Luccioni. “For example, in Quebec, we have a very low-carbon grid that relies mostly on hydro, plus with the cold winters, the heat generated by computing centres can be used to heat homes. If companies had a big incentive to build their data centres there and not in, say, Texas, where the grid is mostly coal-fuelled, it could make a massive impact.”

Switch to green

The Copenhagen Centre on Energy Efficiency, a partnership between the United Nations Environment Programme and the Technical University of Denmark, is a research and advisory work on climate, energy and sustainable development. Gabriela Prata Dias, head of the centre, and Xiao Wang, programme officer, stress that environmental sustainability should be considered as one of the principles towards responsible development and application of AI: “It is important to note that AI is not only just a tool but a resource demander…[and] the benefits of using such technology should outweigh its drawbacks.” They suggest various steps to apply cleaner AI practices. First, they say, the definition of green AI needs to be actionable for all the relevant stakeholders in the industry, rather than be an abstract concept to most technical experts. They advocate for the essential role of standards to drive green AI adoption. “Environmental standards should be developed to ensure the mitigation of environmental impacts…[and] green AI certifications could be introduced to facilitate the industry process for promoting green AI development. For the organizations and companies that are using and deploying AI technologies, practical industry framework and guidelines that support green procurement of AI technologies would support them in looking for environmentally friendly AI practices.” Finally, they add, it is imperative for governments to consider the long-term impacts in setting up a regulatory frameworks and legislations in a way that would legally address transparency and sustainability in AI development.

Deepika Sandeep, an AI scientist who heads the AI and ML programme at Bharat Light & Power (BLP), a Bengaluru-based clean energy generation company, feels that judicious use of deep learning needs to be enforced. “Not every problem demands a machine learning-based solution… [Since] training is the one place which consumes a lot of computational power and hence [increases] carbon footprint, what we do [at BLP] is we minimize our training cycles. Once they are deployed in production there is no training to be done… retraining is done only once in three or six months, depending.” Reaching for solutions based on deep neural networks and deep learning architectures to solve simple problems that can be solved by other, less compute-intensive AI, is “where we are messing with the environment”.

Next level AI

Back in October 2019, Roel Dobbe and Meredith Whittaker, co-founder of the AI Now Institute, wrote a paper on AI and climate change where they advocated seven policy recommendations that could plot the first steps in “tech-aware climate policy, and climate-aware tech policy”. These were: mandate transparency, account for the entire tech ecosystem, watch for rebound effects , make non-energy policy a standard practice, integrate tech and climate policy, curb the use of AI to extract fossil fuels, and address AI’s impact on climate refugees. “In the end,” says Dobbe, “a lot of what the climate fight is about is that we need solidarities, and people on the ground, across the world to making efforts to create this kind of transparency.”

Perhaps Miguel Luengo-Oroz, AI strategist and chief data scientist at the United Nations Global Pulse, has the right idea — that it’s time to get to the “next level”, which is a bigger intersection of AI and climate science. Having attended both NeurIPS and the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP25) in December 2019, he noticed that the intersection between the two conferences was almost non-existent. “I don’t know if anyone else was involved in both… We [spoke] about AI and sustainability at COP25, together with other new emerging technologies. And then at NeurIPS, where there were a lot of researchers, they met few climate experts… We need real experts; experts who deeply understand both sides of the game.”

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Dhar, P. The carbon impact of artificial intelligence. Nat Mach Intell 2 , 423–425 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-0219-9

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Published : 12 August 2020

Issue Date : August 2020

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-0219-9

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