🍃Are you Walking Your Sustainability Talk? Becoming Earth Positive

Welcome back 🖐,

The business world has been moving steadily (although not always expeditiously) and in an increasingly structured manner towards more sustainable business practices. While many of you are actually contributing to this progress in your work roles, are you a case of Dr. Jekyll at work and Mr. Hyde in your personal life when it comes to sustainability? Or maybe you have made some personal inroads but lack the structure that you have in your work initiatives? Where do we start when it comes to assessing our personal impact on the planet? 

Whether you are just getting started or are far along in your personal sustainability journey, I have gathered on this article tools 👇 that will help you assess your current state, identify opportunities for improvement and/or expand your ambition.

Background: Have we been doing it wrong?

In some ways, it feels like we have been doing it wrong by creating silos and neglecting action where is urgently needed. Although climate change has become the most visible sustainability topic, the world is (finally!) moving to a more holistic approach that considers our footprints not just around carbon but our overall impact on the planet. This is an urgently needed evolution considering that climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, waste pollution and oceans acidification are pieces of the same puzzle.

I am going to use the term Earth footprint for this article to refer to our overall personal impact on the planet including, climate, biodiversity, water, waste, and anything else related to natural and planetary systems (note that businesses are using separate terminology for climate action and nature action. For instance, in business, the term “nature positive” refers to businesses impact on nature, particularly around biodiversity, and usually used separately from climate, although I personally I think climate should be folded into the nature-positive concept).

If you break down the components of our Earth footprint, below are key areas to consider, which mirror areas of interest for businesses:

a. Water

b. Waste

c. Climate

d. Biodiversity

e. Overall Earth Impact

Assessment and Taking Action: mirror, mirror on the wall, am I the greenest of them all?

There is a growing set of tools available to access your Earth footprint across each of the areas above. I tried several of the most popular ones to understand their scope and to create my own baseline. Below is a list of the ones I tried and observations from using them to help you choose which to use.  Are you ready to score yourself? 😅

In an ideal world, you should complete one tool from each category and get your baseline (each tool will take you ~10-20mins to complete). However, if this feels like too much, my recommendation, as a start, is to at least do the Ecological Footprint below as it is the most encompassing and do the rest over time. 

a. Water 💧

Personal water sustainability has rapidly become a critical aspect to consider particularly in areas with water scarcity. The tool below helps you access your water consumption. The tool is enlightening because it not only looks at direct water use, but also at water needed to produce goods that we consume. 

· a.1. Water Footprint, by GRACE Communications Foundation: this was probably the most comprehensive tool of all of the tools listed of any category and one that you should complete to get a handle on your water use. It looks at the following factors: household size, baths, shower length, types of shower heads, types of sink and kitchen faucets, duration of faucet use, type of toilet, frequency of flushing, kitchen faucet use, dishwashing method, laundry, greywater system, garden watering, type of landscaping, pool, car washing, and consumption of water in food items consumed, electricity, goods, fuel production and waste.

b. Waste 🥤

Both of the tools for waste focus on plastic waste, which is understandable given the low level of recycling of the material and how long it lasts in nature. However, an area of improvement for waste tools would be to include other categories of waste that are also causing pollution and that have maxed out nature’s capacity to degrade them given their abundance. 

Both of the calculators below look at food, kitchen, bathroom, laundry, disposable packaging, and other items to estimate kgs/yr. of plastic waste. Of the two, I personally preferred the Plastic Footprint Calculator, but they are similar so you could choose either one.

b.1. Plastic Footprint Calculator, by Omni Calculators. In the results, this tool shares comparisons to the USA, Europe, and global averages, and how long it takes for plastic to decompose.

b.2. Plastic Calculator, by EarthDay.org: This tool includes a pledge section to indicate which categories of plastic usage you will commit to reduce.

c. Climate 🌥

This is the most established category with many (many!) carbon footprint tools available. Here are four calculators which are some of the most reputable and widely used: 

c.1 CoolClimate Network: it looks at your household size, income, travel, transportation, home, food, shopping. It gives options to take action and the resulting impact in carbon tons, costs and $s saved.

c.2. Conservation International: it looks at your location, housing, energy type usage, recycling, diet, transportation, travel. You cannot input air miles travelled; you have to input types of trips. It tells you how many trees are needed to offset your carbon footprint and suggests actions to reduce it, including paying for carbon offsets.

c.3. Carbon Footprint Ltd: it looks at your housing electricity, air travel, car mileage, other transportation and several consumption categories based on dollars spent. It compares your footprint to your country’s and the world’s average.

c.4. My Climate: calculates your footprint based on multiple-choice questions around mobility, consumption, household, public services. Because it is multiple choice, the categories are more general than some of the other calculators, but it does include a public services category which was not in the others.

c.5. My Climate Flights Only: this is specific to air travel. It calculates the footprint for specific flights based on from-to locations. This should give you more accurate calculations for your air travel if you travel specific routes.

d. Biodiversity 🦁

There is no biodiversity calculator that I could find for individuals, but the Ecological footprint in the next section does touch on an individual’s impact on biodiversity by calculating how much land is needed to cover your ecological footprint.

e. Overall Earth Impact 🌐

Although there is no Overall Earth Impact or Earth Neutral or Positive calculator, the tool below comes close as it collects information across multiple categories.

e.1. Ecological Footprint, by Global Footprint Network. This calculator will calculate your ecological footprint and carbon footprint. It is closely linked to the concept of Earth overshoot day so you can calculate your personal Earth overshoot date, number of Earths needed to support you, and how you fare versus your country. You can also see the ecological footprint for all countries and compare them to your country. The calculator focuses on the type of things you eat, your housing, electricity usage and use of renewable energy, general amount of trash, level of consumption, transportation by car and air. This calculator does not touch on water and it does not look as in depth at emissions and waste as the tools above for those specific areas do. 

Personal Learnings: from Victimhood to Empowerment

As you probably do, I personally take a lot of small (like not using straws) and big steps (like not owning a car) to reduce my impact on the planet and it showed on the tools. I was significantly below the averages for my benchmarks for water, plastic, carbon, and ecological footprint “only needing” 1.5 Earths (taking out air travel which I will get to in a second). Achieving that takes effort as we are swimming against the current of ingrained global systems that generally do not make it easy to be Earth positive (although that is slowly changing). It is nice to see those efforts reflected by the tools and if you have achieved progress, you should give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back!

However, there was an area for me, air travel ✈, which was worse than I thought it would be. For my ecological footprint, air travel caused me to place above the USA biocapacity per person and although the score was still significantly below the average USA ecological footprint per person, it was higher than I would like it to be. Unfortunately, air travel is one of the industries which will be hardest to decarbonize: there will not be electric airplanes any time soon and Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFs) are still early in their implementation (versus for example, the automobile industry where you could just buy an electric car). Travel is part of what I do and I already use it to give a voice to nature, but while I am largely dependent on the airline industry to fix this, that does not mean that I cannot and should not take personal action by doing it differently. That is an area for me to continue to focus on and I have ideas to apply in the way that I travel going into 2024. 

Although my focus area is air travel, you might have a different one. It is empowering to think about ways of addressing them even if you are limited in what you can do. Take a stab at changing your impact in that area however you can!

Final Musings before Letting you Unleash your Green Powers

I know that you are eager to score yourself 😊, but before you do, I wanted to share some helpful overarching learnings from going through the exercise of trying these tools. One of the key insights is that better than most people does not necessarily mean good for the planet. While comparing yourself to the averages might indicate that you are making progress, it could still mean that your Earth footprint is too high. 

At the same time, in some cases, there are no absolutes. For example, higher water consumption might not be as problematic in areas with plentiful water supply and certain countries have greater biocapacity that can tolerate greater use of resources. You need to keep context in mind and some tools are really good at doing that like the Ecological Footprint. 

Another important insight is that there will need to be systemic change (widespread use of renewable energy, electric transportation, lower prevalence of single-use plastic packaging, etc.). The way that the current systems work, no matter how hard you try in your personal realm, you might still not get to a low enough footprint level to achieve true sustainability and become Earth neutral or positive. 

And last but not least, we have already been taxing planetary systems for several decades beyond their capacity to absorb our impact. 1970 was the last year that we lived within Earth’s capacity to sustain us 🌎. Therefore, it is better to overshoot in your action to reduce your impact than to just do a little better than average so that we give Earth a chance for some R&R and to restore itself.

When you are in the sustainability field, personal choices come into greater scrutiny from yourself and others. Personally, I hate when somebody says: “you care about climate change, so why are you doing x or y?” We all live on the same planet, but somehow people that advocate for sustainability are the only ones responsible for it? Hmm, NO, we are ALL responsible. However, those more knowledgeable about how to have a better relationship with the Earth do have an opportunity to educate and be on the leading edge of action.

Hopefully, this article gave you some inspiration wherever you are in your personal journey to be Earth neutral or positive. Feel free to share any aha moments or where you are in your personal journey! 

Enjoy and reflect 💭. Warm regards / saludos,

Julio