Reducing carbon footprints

Definition of a Carbon Footprint: It is a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of green house gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide. It is made up of the sum of two parts - the direct / primary footprint and the indirect / secondary foot

The primary footprint is a measure of our direct emissions of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels including domestic energy consumption and transportation (e.g. car and plane).

The secondary footprint is a measure of the indirect CO2 emissions from the whole lifecycle of products we use - those associated with their manufacture and eventual breakdown.

Where BusinessAcrossBorders helps
BusinessAcrossBorders strives to support globalisation and by using local expertise, services and solutions because it seemed pretty stupid to fly around the world quite so much when reliable and trusted local partners can be found on the network. Worldsourcing in the 21st century, with all the available communications allows you to save time, money and resources.

Reliable local partners reduce the need to travel
The premise is that if a trusted and rated network could be generated then there would be less need to monitor a project or operation locally. Continued globalisation is inevitable but in a world packed with communications it doesn’t have to bring with it the unnecessary environmental contamination through perhaps unnecessary business travel.

Closer to home
I was surprised recently when I scored so badly with an online questionnaire assessing my personal carbon footprint. I ponder over global warming and have made personal adjustments but I was astonished to see that my carbon footprint came out at 7.7. I was informed we should all be aiming for 5 or below. When I took the test again, removing flights my score came down to 5.5. My score also told me that if everyone in the world would have a score of 7.7 then we would need 4.2 planets. So the plain fact is that there are just far too many people in the world for the amount of environmental abuse that continues to increase. I now look even more carefully at travel, both car and flight and am mindful on matters of waste and unnecessary usage of resources and power.

Travelling to a central office doesn't always make sense
By not travelling so much we can reduce our personal footprints. It seems quite mad when you consider that in a great many cases, travel to the firm's office results in sitting at a desk, mainly writing, desk research or communicating with people by phone or email. It also makes no sense to fly on business so much when you can talk to people so effectively using all manner of communication options. It's evident that unless there is a need to be somewhere through fulfilling a required physical task then we are acting irresponsibly. It seems that the reason we travel on business so much is to meet with people, share documents or to ensure that initiatives are carried out effectively.

An exploding population
The developed world is becoming increasingly concerned about both China and India as their carbon footprints are inevitably growing. India now stands at number four as a world-class polluter having recently overtaken Japan and the situation will continue to deteriorate with greater travel and an increased greenhouse gases. Last year Airbus forecast that passenger traffic in India would grow at a steady and staggering 7.7% a year until 2025.

More feet with ever growing footprints (we must reduce our steps)
In 2000 India was responsible for 1.89 billion tonnes of CO2 (5.6 per cent of the world total) – just a few million tonnes behind the Russian Federation at 1.91 billion tonnes (5.7%). Of course India isn’t quite yet in the carbon catastrophe league represented by the Chinese or American economies. In 2000 China produced a massive 4.96 billion tonnes of CO2 (14.7 per cent of the world total). But even China’s carbon count was dwarfed by the 6.87 billion tonnes of CO2 spewed out by America; a country with less than 4% of the world’s population yet is responsible for 20.3% of the world’s environmental pollution. If America could reduce its CO2 to European levels it could halve its level of pollution.

India now has over a billion people and so emissions will continue their rapid growth. By 2050 it is expected that India will take the crown as the world’s most populous nation and will have grown to 1.6 billion, pushing China with 1.4 billion in to second place. You only need to do some simple maths to calculate why the growth of the Indian economy will have such consequences for the planet's global warming. Similarly you can also conclude that America needs to implement significant reductions.

Taking personal responsibility
To put this in perspective, using India as an example, if every Indian took one return short haul flight, it would be enough to increase the carbon footprint by over a billion tonnes of CO2, – almost twice Britain’s current total emissions.

During the fifty or so years that I have been on the planet the population has more than doubled and grown from 2.7 billion to 6,6 billion. We are told the world needs to reduce carbon emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic global warming. We need to cut CO2 emissions and so where do we start?... It's all pretty obvious I think…. with me and with you!

 
Karl Capp, Managing Director, BusinessAcrossBorders