The European Happy Planet Index is an idex of carbon efficiency and well being in the European Union. Friends of the Earth and nef (which looks at ‘economics as if people and the plant actually mattered’) have teamed up to come up with the index to look at people’s well being and how European countries are doing with regard to reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Strickingly the UK has the fourth biggest carbon footprint per head in Europe! This works out at 3.32 hectares per capita (this works out at somewhere round 19.8 tonnes of CO2 per person.) Compare this to Latvia at the top of the table with a mere 0.45 hectares per capita! As the nef explains:
‘If we take the world’s total biocapacity measured in global hectares (gha) (1.8 gha per person) and subtract from it all that is required to support our dietary needs (0.8 gha) and built-up land use, we are left with 1.0 g/ha per person available for carbon sequestration. Countries living within these means can be deemed to have an acceptable carbon footprint satisfying “one-planet living”.
Clearly, then, the first thing to note about this table is that Europe as a whole requires very significantly more than its equitable fair share of biocapacity to sustain current levels of consumption. Indeed, by this standard, only Latvia is living within its global fair share.’ Interesting facts indeed! The UK clearly has a lot of work to do. Check out some of our other articles to see what you can do to reduce your own carbon footprint….
So where does the UK rank in comparison with the rest of world? The answer is that it is ranked at number 8 contributing 2.2% of the total of all CO2 emissions. The USA is at number 1 contributing 22.2%. The table of the top five offenders looks like this:
USA 22.2% of total CO2 emissions
China 18.4%
Russia 5.6%
India 4.9%
Japan 4.6%
These figures come from CDIAC from the United Nations. If we look at annual CO2 emissions from each country we see that the USA emits 6,049,435 metric tonnes of CO2 in comparison to the UK with 587,261 tonnes!
If we all do our bit we can help reduce our CO2 emissions so what are you waiting for? It’s not as difficult as you think!
