Climate change and carbon footprints are getting more and more important for businesses. This is quite a topical subject as today is the start of the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

In BT a few weeks ago an opportunity came to us to explore ways that we could try to change behaviour of employees who have lots of face to face meetings, by showing them the impact their travel and employees travel have on the environment in the hope they would start having more meetings through the mediums of the telephone and/or the internet.


Captain Planet is equally interested in the planet

Most carbon footprint calculators tend to just give you a number and let you offset it by planting some trees or some other green activity. This seems wrong. The measurement of a carbon footprint with respect to carbon emissions is kilograms of carbon dioxide (kg co2). So say your latest holiday cost you 3000kg of co2 emissions. If a carbon footprint calculator tells you that number, it probably won't mean anything to you. What most calculators do is then say 'well you can get someone to plant X amount of trees to offset that'. So what? It doesn't stop you going on holiday or even repeating that holiday, as you can offset it (not to mention most people won't offset it anyway). All it seems to be offsetting is your guilt. It's not going you to change your behaviour.

What I thought would be a more effective method is to put that number into perspective. In the above example say we could map that 3000kg of co2 number to a number we could understand - such as number of tree deaths, deaths of fairies per square mile or to a global temperature increase in degrees celcius. The world would be shocked and appalled about the amount of fairy deaths and maybe just maybe as a result of that change their behaviour. The problem is these numbers don't seem to exist. No one really knows the real impact of co2 emissions, we just know the more co2 we produce the more we are contributing to global warming. So the next best thing seems to be to map this number to other activities such as how much co2 we create through breathing or computer usage.

So what I have is a first version of a Carbon Footprint tool for measuring travel in an understandable way with the hope that it will be greatly improved by feedback. You can download a copy from here (right click and save locally). Open the html file into a web browser (IE users will have to enable Active X) and the tool will appear.

Now lets take an example where a face to face meeting is being arranged for 5 people in London. Out of those 5 people, Martin is from Ipswich, Jon is from Bristol, Paul is from Edinburgh and Jeremy and Ben are from Sevenoaks (a realistic prospect in BT as we have offices in all of these places). Lets say everyone is getting a train to the meeting except Paul from Edinburgh who is flying down. We fill in the form like so, clicking add participant to add new people to the meeting.


(Note there is also an 'add details' button which allows you
to describe journeys where you might use a variety of transport, eg. plane to London Heathrow, train to Paddington London and then the tube to office).

Then we hit the 'calculate' button in the top right. You will need to hit the allow button in the security message (and tick the box remember this decision) if you are using Firefox or Safari. It will then using a google api to work out where the places are you have entered and work out the distance in kilometres between that location and the meeting. These can they be mapped to kg of co2 emitted. In this particular example the carbon footprint is calculated to be just over 111kg. Owch. In addition to this figure it will give a few examples of what this number is equivalent to. It also shows that Paul from Edinburgh is responsible for most of this figure so it might result in the questions "Does Paul really need to come?" or "Should Paul take the train instead?"

So please download my tool, have a play with it and suggest more ways we can use it to save the planet. If you have any other useful figures that could be incorporated into the tool your comments are most most most welcome. For the developer geeks who are interested in the code check out my subversion account.