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.