Beyond personal carbon footprints, seeking a more sustainable planet

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - How should we live on a planet where the rate of extreme weather events seem to be increasing, and humanity is the cause? 


“We're not doing well in terms of global temperatures at all. We're on a dangerous trajectory. We are not going to keep below the 1.5°C on average limit, that seems really clear.  We're actually over 1.5°C in terms of individual years already, but the target was stated in terms of multi-year averages. It's clear, with the inertia and the climate system, that we're going to exceed that. It also seems quite clear that we're going to exceed the 2.0°C limit the way things are going. We just don't have the kind of policy action that we need internationally,” explained Dr Kai Chan, a professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at University of British Columbia, Lead Editor of the new British Ecological Society journal 'People and Nature' and co-founder of CoSphere for a community of small planet heroes. 


“That all said, I personally am concerned more broadly than just with climate. I'm an ecological scientist, and we think about a wide range of different stressors to the natural world, including to the benefits that we receive from that natural world.”


“In that context, we’re also doing poorly. We're not taking the kind of action that we need on the land use change that undermines ecosystems, threatened species, as well as crucial processes like water purification and flood mitigation, drought control. Unfortunately, these are hard times to be on the planet Earth.”
 
Some suggest we need to curtail our personal carbon footprints. 

According to Statistica, the average Canadian emitted 15.22 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022. That’s more than three times the global average.


A number of people on Cortes Island, and some other rural communities, have carbon footprints that are closer to those of the developing world. We have few electronic devices, do not use our cars often and our principal heating source is a heat pump. 

Lacking any other data, I (the author) used the carbon calculator at climate hero.org and calculated my personal carbon footprint. The answer was 3.4 metric tons. There are most likely people in rural areas like Cortes whose footprint is less than half of this.** 


Yet I am also going on a trip abroad this year. This will add another 7.25 metric tons* to my tally, which I am going to divide by 10 as I have not flown since 2015 and do not expect to take another flight in the near future. That would bring my personal carbon footprint to a bit more than 4.12 metric tons, which is still less than the global average of 4.66 metric tones and far below that of most of my fellow Canadians.


Kai Chan: “It’s an amazing effort and what you're doing is showing how far we can go as individuals. It also reveals that we can't go all the way to a sustainable society through those individual level efforts. I live in Vancouver because I am employed at the University of British Columbia, it's not feasible for me to do all of the things that you're doing, and I'm not the only one.” 


“What we try to do is to pivot the conversation so that those folks who can't emulate that at this point in their lives can still feel like they're contributing meaningfully towards making this planet a more sustainable place.”


He also pointed out that we really can't measure our carbon footprint without taking into account the contribution of the society around us.