The CAPS Carbon Footprinting project
The Carbon Awareness Partnership Sidmouth hopes to work on several projects – and a key starting point is the Carbon Footprinting project
This aims to:
Reduce the environmental impact of the residents of the Sid Valley through a bottom-up, granular approach to understanding and reducing individual carbon footprints.
Support Sid Valley residents to estimate their individual household carbon footprint and provide them with relevant information; on this basis encourage them to make specific changes to reduce their footprint.
Demonstrate that these small changes collectively add up to a material, measurable, overall change for the Sid Valley.
The Carbon Footprint Calculator
If you want to accurately measure your carbon footprint, the CAPS team would recommend the Carbon Savvy people as reliable and scientific – and fun!
Go to our page here to try out one of their calculators.
The Centre for Sustainable Energy has an ongoing report (it publishes every day) on Sidmouth’s carbon footprint:
Carbon Footprint Report: Sidmouth Civil parish – 02/03/2024
Welcome to your carbon footprint report!
This report tells you about your community’s carbon1 footprint – both the scale of emissions and the main activities responsible for the emissions. This information comes from Impact – an online community carbon footprint calculator: https://impact-tool.org.uk/.
The tool was developed by the Centre for Sustainable Energy and the University of Exeter, initially to make carbon footprinting at parish level possible. Since its inception a number of improvements have been made, including the ability to look at different-sized geographical areas.
Your report shows both ‘consumption based’ and ‘territorial’ emissions, and also shows how your footprint compares with the district average and the national average.
Here’s an illustration of “the annual carbon emissions (measured in tonnes CO2e2) emitted as a result of the different activities that residents within your parish’s boundary engage in – from heating to eating.”
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Crucially, the report looks at not only where the impacts are being made – but how we can work on reducing them – that is ‘Change Targets’ – whether on transport or food.
Have a look through the report: pretty impressive and pretty useful!