Carbon Footprint and Ecological Footprint services

The term footprint has rapidly gained popularity over the past few years. It is now common to talk about a person’s, organization’s or community’s carbon footprint as a measure of direct and indirect CO2 emissions caused by that entity.

While reducing our carbon footprint is important when it comes to addressing global warming, it is not sufficient to achieve sustainability. We also all use natural resources such as cropland, forests, grazing land, fishing grounds, and others. Added up, all this resource use constitutes our ecological footprint. If you compare the amount of resources available on the planet to our actual use, we would need around 5 planets to support the world’s population assuming everybody lived like the average U.S. citizen. And that does not even take into account the needs of wildlife that is also supported by the planet.

An example of our work: The Ecological Footprint of biofuels.
(read more in our publications section)

Sustainability Planning Partners employs various methods for determining organizations’ carbon and Ecological Footprints. The two main methods are Materials flow Analysis (MFA, which includes Life Cycle Analysis) and Economic Input-Output based analysis (EIO). These methods are complementary in their use. MFA requires having a good picture of the physical quantities of materials, energy, and wastes that flow through an organization or organizational unit. EIO requires having a good picture of your expenditures. When determining the Footprint of an organization, performing an EIO analysis may be sufficient for generating a reliable picture of the scope 3 Footprint due to the sum total of all the supply chains that serve the organization. MFA can then be deployed to provide more details about high-impact areas and analyze improvement alternatives.

Recognizing the cost and effort barrier that often stands in the way of starting on a Footprint analysis, we have developed Footprint Scanner™ as a tool to assist you with performing your own (EIO-based) analysis for your organization. Try it today.