Let’s Get Green

Many of the world’s scientists now agree that to avoid the worst impacts of climate change we need to make sure that average temperature rise stays below 2°C (3.4°F) above pre-industrial temperature. If Scotland is to play its full and equal part in tackling climate change and help prevent global temperatures from exceeding 2°C, it must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050.

To succeed in reaching this target, we all need to start doing things now. Our actions must be at a scale that is adequate to deal with the scale of the problem – this means that we need to go beyond the tokenistic. That doesn’t mean that we all need to invest in hair shirts, switch to a diet of muesli and nettle soup and give up any travel that can’t be achieved on horseback. It does mean that we need to make some changes though – to dispute this would be unreasonable.

Complex carbon footprints

Odd as this line of argument might seem, the complexity of the pattern of our greenhouse gas emissions may help us in understanding and dealing with our personal impact on climate change. To meet our personal target as set out by the Scottish Climate Change Bill (2009) to reduce our emissions by 42% by 2020, we each need to achieve reductions of around 4% for each of the next 10 years.* We won’t achieve this target simply by making a single change, such as recycling our cans and bottles for example. However, by recycling our cans and bottles and also making a handful of further small adjustments to our lifestyle, we can meet our annual 4% target.

If everyone reduced their emissions in this way, the national rate of per capita consumption would fall from the current 11.61 tCO₂* to 7.72 tCO₂ by 2020. If we kept reducing at this rate, then by 2050, per capita emissions would be just 2.27 tCO₂. Doesn’t this make an Everest scale target seem a bit more manageable?

Personal carbon budgets

Everything we do or choose not to do matters – greenhouse gas budgeting is a bit like financial budgeting. You wouldn’t spend your pounds and pennies with great care when it came to your food shopping but then spend without thought in all other areas. Therefore being green in one or two areas but not in lots of others won’t work either. Here are the 6 steps you will need to follow to be a good carbon budgeter:

Take a baseline of your environmental impact so you know what your full impact actually is and how this is broken down into different areas;
Look at where you can make changes, both little and large from across all areas of your lifestyle;
Make the changes;
Encourage one other household to follow your example;
Feel great etcetera;
Do it all again next year.

Help with carbon budgeting – take the planet pledge

To get a guide of what your emissions are, visit Directgov and follow the survey to find out the annual emissions of your household. Then put your CO₂ into our animal footprint calculator to find out what kind of impact you are having.

* The targets for the Climate Challenge Bill are for the production-based emission of Scotland. The emissions reductions that we make as individuals are consumption-based emissions. These are not the same, but currently the per-capita scale is very similar. New Caledonian Woodlands recognises this difference but feels that the targets within the Climate Challenge Bill are appropriate in scale for individuals to adopt at the current time. For further explanation of the difference between production and consumption based emissions, please refer to the report Counting Consumption - CO2 emissions, material flows and Ecological Footprint of the UK by region and devolved country – WWF (2006).