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Environment Carbon Footprint
Zero footprint Carbon calculator is launched
by Andrew Smith, faculty of environmental studies UW
Waterloo - The faculties of Applied Health Sciences and Environmental Studies are competing for bragging rights using a new university-wide tool for calculating carbon footprints.
Patti Cook, alumni officer in ES, has been co-ordinating the project and explains that “the Zerofootprint University of Waterloo Calculator will allow UW students, staff, and faculty to determine their carbon footprint — the impact we each make on the environment based on our lifestyle.”
The official UW Zerofootprint launch is Thursday at 2:00 p.m. in the great hall of the Student Life Centre. All UW students, staff, and faculty are invited to attend and enjoy refreshments. Deep Saini, Dean of Environmental Studies, and Roger Mannell, Dean of AHS, will be co-hosting the event along with special guest Ron Dembo, engineering alumnus and president of Zerofootprint.
Members of the UW community are being encouraged to register for the online calculator. Once the calculator has quantified your footprint, the website offers advice on how to reduce it through tips. You will be able to run "what-if" scenarios based on the tips you like. These simulations will illustrate the reduction in your footprint. It will allow you to compare your achievements with other individuals or groups, and will enable you to form or join groups that set goals and challenges. Most importantly, the Calculator will enable you to see what an enormous impact the small changes that you make can have when aggregated with those of others.
"Carbon footprint" is a measure of the greenhouse gases an individual, population, product or activity emits. The "carbon" refers to carbon dioxide (CO2) and greenhouse gases in general (which are converted to carbon dioxide equivalents for convenience of calculation), the accumulation of which in the atmosphere leads to global warming and climate change.
We produce CO2 emissions, directly or indirectly, whenever we drive our cars, heat our homes, or in a hundred other ways as we go about our daily lives. The primary cause of CO2 emissions is the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, while deforestation for logging or farming is responsible for about a quarter of all emissions. The carbon footprint, calculated in tonnes of CO2, gives us a measure of how much we are contributing to global warming, and enables us to set goals for reducing our emissions and tracking our success.
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