Dear Teacher or Parent,

The Zerofootprint Kid's Calculator measures the direct impact of a child's lifestyle on the planet. Our measurements are made in terms kids understand: carbon, land, water and trees. Answer all the questions you can. If you are running out of time or don't know one of the answers, the Calculator will automatically default to the national personal average for that question.

For class lessons and learning materials, click on the categories listed on the left. This reference material is arranged by class level and ages. If you know of any material that would be useful to share with other teachers or parents, let us know. We will include it on our list.

To learn more about the carbon, land, water and tree footprint measures, please keep reading.

The Idea Behind The Calculator

The idea behind the calculator is that all of our decisions and patterns of behaviour add up to a "footprint," which is just a way of measuring people’s demands on nature. The more we consume, the bigger our footprint is. Indeed, our footprint is global. Much of our food, our goods, our fuel, and our resources come from somewhere else. Plus, our waste, particularly our greenhouse gas emissions, can have an effect on people everywhere.

Our footprint is not confined to Canada. If everyone on the planet consumed resources and goods at the same rate that Canadians do, we would need roughly four planets like ours to provide the basic materials and to absorb our waste. That’s just another way of saying that something has got to give.

The calculator provides numbers in terms of carbon dioxide, water, trees, and land. For example, the average Canadian makes a series of decisions every day that creates nearly 9 tonnes of CO2 each year, while using 1,630,000 litres of water, 3.5 trees, and 3.3 hectares of land.

The Zerofootprint Kid's Calculator accounts for: the things we buy and discard, the way we get around, the way we live and the places we live. The per capita values for Canada – that is, the total amount the country emits, including industry, divided by the number of Canadians -- suggests that we are among the most wasteful people on Earth.

This sounds grim, we know. But we prefer to see the huge opportunities that lie before us. There is a great deal we can do if we act.

Carbon Dioxide

In terms of energy and CO2 emissions, the field is wide open. For example, a small investment in efficient appliances and home insulation will not only help save the planet, it will actually save money. (Tip: The returns on compact fluorescent light bulb actually outperform the stock market!) A car produces about three times its own weight in CO2 - so get a smaller car, drive it a little less, keep it tuned up, keep the tires properly inflated, and learn to drive efficiently. If every Canadian were to do this, the carbon savings would run into the millions of tonnes.

Trees

We probably do not need to make a case for the importance of trees. Everyone knows that trees breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen. In other words, they fight global warming just by being alive. Yet, we’re cutting down forests down at a rate of 13 million hectares a year. Deforestation accounts for nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and at the same time the world’s greatest forests, including the Amazon, are threatened by rising temperatures. That is to say, deforestation is both a cause and effect of global warming.

What can we do to save trees? Many different factors converge to threaten the world’s forests, and we can’t address all of them directly. For example, farmers in Brazil clear rainforest to raise cattle. This increases our footprint when we eat that beef. In Indonesia, ancient forests are cleared to make room for palm oil plantations. Making paper gobbles up vast tracts of woodland. Using paper more efficiently, and looking for recycled paper and paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, would save countless acres of forest. If every Canadian were to switch just one magazine subscription from a delivery to an online membership, 3.3 million trees would be saved.

Water

We’ve all heard that water will be a precious resource in the 21st century, that irrigation systems are already in peril, and that the drinking water reserves of cities like Sydney, Australia, are already drying up. Here in Canada we have a wealth of fresh water, which we squander without a thought. For example, if every Canadian were to turn off the tap while brushing their teeth, we’d save enough water to supply our biggest city, Toronto, for a year. That’s enough to fill 188,000 swimming pools. On the one hand, it’s shocking that we waste that much water. On the other, it’s reassuring that we can save that much without giving up anything at all. Low-flow water fixtures promise to save even more. Even though our vast system of lakes and rivers gives us the impression that we have more than enough to spare, the fact is that the energy costs of purifying and distributing that water are very high, and increase our footprint.

Land

It’s easy to see that there is only so much land to go around. And the more the planet’s population grows, the smaller the area of land each of us will be entitled to. There are about 11 billion hectares of productive land on the planet. If we divide this amount by the number of people in the world, we get nearly two hectares each. On a per capita basis, Canadians use over four times that number, and we use almost twice that number just in our everyday decisions. This means that if the world is to live equitably and sustainably (and if the world’s population does not rise), we’d need to consume a lot less.

The calculator provides suggestions on ways we can reduce our footprint. The calculator uses answers to questions like “How did you get to school today?” to come up with a kid’s footprint. Clearly, driving to school will increase the footprint. Walking will bring it down. Eating fast food will push the footprint up (it’s highly packaged, it’s been shipped great distances, it probably contains meat from a high-footprint farm, etc.), while shopping locally will bring it down. The final few questions relate to mitigating factors. In other words, if you live in a big house, but turn your lights off when you’re not in the room, turn off your computer when it’s not in use, and your parents ride bikes to work, what might have been a large footprint comes down in size. That is to say, the questions themselves provide learning opportunities to the user.

Learning

To help you provide a learning opportunity from each question, we provide points for you to have at your disposal when the question comes up. For example, when the question comes up about whether the child is driven to school, you will know that driving accounts for approximately one third of a family’s carbon footprint - which means 7.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year (for a family of three). That’s enough to fill 147,500 birthday balloons. This will help make sense of things as the kids go along, so that the figures at the end of the process are something more than numbers on a page.

Finally, we’d like to accent the positive in all this. It’s too easy to see only the problems before us. Certainly, those problems are real, but solving them is going to mean an exciting new world, and an environment of intellectual ferment and creativity. We - and the kids who use this calculator - will be inventing the world anew. There’s no reason that shouldn’t be fun.