Carbon Footprint Calculators

The turn of the year is a time to plan and make positive changes to live better lives. In planning and learning how to live more sustainably, carbon footprint calculators can be useful tools for finding out where you’re at and targeting areas of improvement. The average yearly carbon footprint of a Finnish person is over 10,000 kg co2e. To stay below 1.5 degrees of warming, this needs to be cut to 2,500 kg by the year 2030 and to 700 kg by 2050. [1] There is great potential in reducing our carbon footprints with lifestyle changes since about 70% of all emissions are linked to personal consumption (68% in Finland, 72% globally). [2]

Personally we have been living pleasant low-carbon lives for years. Our individual carbon footprints have been between 1300 and 2300 kg, depending on the calculator, our living situation and yearly consumption. This is below the 2030 goal and easy for us to maintain, but we don’t yet know how to reach the 2050 goal.

To estimate your personal carbon footprint, here are some calculators we recommend:

Sitra
https://lifestyletest.sitra.fi
A simple test for estimating your yearly emissions that divides them into 4 basic categories.

Climate diet
https://ilmastodieetti.ymparisto.fi/ilmastodieetti/
A lot more detailed calculator that gives you more accurate results, but you need to have quite detailed data of your consumption for it to work.

Spark
https://sparksustainability.com/the-solution/#calculator
Spark’s calculator has a super simple 5 question test that gives you a general idea, and then you can dive deeper and answer more questions that give you more specific options than Sitra’s test but you don’t need nearly as much data as for the Climate diet calculator. (Unfortunately Spark’s calculator doesn’t give accurate results if you heat with renewable electricity. We have contacted Spark about this and they said they are going to fix it.

Spark is also currently developing an app for calculating and reducing your carbon footprint. Another upcoming app is My Carbon Action by Enfuce that uses data of your purchases automatically without a need to input it manually. If you know of any other carbon calculators or relevant apps, let us know!

Sources
1 Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Aalto University, and D-mat ltd. 2019. 1.5-Degree Lifestyles: Targets and Options for Reducing Lifestyle Carbon Footprints. Technical Report.
2 Finnish Environment Institute. 2017. Consumption choices to decrease personal carbon footprints of Finns.