New community carbon calculator
The Centre for Sustainable Energy and the University of Exeter’s Centre for Energy & the Environment has developed a community carbon calculator. The tool gives the ability to view carbon emission estimates at a parish level, in an easy to interpret view. Cleeve Parish Council was invited to be a part of the development for this tool back in April 2020, and the end product is now available to view.
The aim of the tool is to enable small settlements like parishes, town or city neighbourhoods to have robust and accurate data on their carbon footprint, so they can best direct their efforts to tackle the climate emergency.
We would invite you to view the tool and if you have a particular interest in the data, then you can access the raw data behind the infographics. To view the tool: httsp://impact-tool.org.uk
A useful aspect of the tool is that it gives you the ability to compare Cleeve’s carbon footprint against other parishes and also against the national average. Figure 1 shows this comparison, looking at the consumption rather than the territory. These are choices we make on an individual basis, such as the type of transport we choose, the type of heating we use in our homes and the food products we buy. Whereas the territorial view shows categories such as agriculture, industries and transportation.
Figure 1.
As you can see Cleeve is producing 21.7t of Carbon Dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per household per annum compared to only 13.1t CO2e for England as a national average. Cleeve is significantly higher than the national average in every category. Some useful information which you cannot see in figure 1, but you can access from the tool is each household in Cleeve on average are responsible for 2t CO2e per annum on flights (9% of the total footprint), 2.6t CO2e per annum on private transport (12% of footprint) and 0.6t CO2e on public transport (3% of footprint). 2.3t CO2e (11% of footprint) is on our use of oil-fired heating.
Figure 2 shows the territorial view and again Cleeve comes out way above the national average. A large contributing category in this is road transport. Having the main trunk road (A370) run through the village impacts the village significantly in terms of the carbon footprint.
Figure 2.
Cleeve Parish Council declared a Climate Emergency back in October 2019 along with many other town and parish councils around the country. We can now use this tool as a baseline and review how we can positively impact the carbon footprint of our local community through our Climate Emergency plan. The tool is also hugely important for the individual to see the impact of some of the choices we all make.
