India - (1b) - Ecological Footprint

Aug 27, 2017 by Aditya Sriram

1. What part of your ecological footprint most surprised you?

As per the ecological footprint calculator, our family uses 2.1 earths, which quite surprised me. I used to think i might have only used the worth of half an earth. My carbon footprint is 7 tonnes per year, which is quite a lot.

2. How did your footprint compare to your city’s average (if available) and your country’s average?

But still, our's is almost the same as Hyderabad's average of 1.9. However, it's far more than the whole country's average 1.16. So, this not only shows that our city is one of the richest, but also shows how poor our country is. But, still the global average is more than 1, so we must be careful and try to reduce it as much as possible. 

3. Find a location with a smaller carbon footprint from yours, within your own country if possible. What is different about this community from your own? What can you learn from this?

The city Nellore, which is quite which is quite close from Hyderabad, has only an average of 1.3, far lower than Hyderabad's. In Nellore, there are lot more trees planted everywhere, especially around our house. These trees purify the air and we always never had smoke in air. There are also fewer vehicles, as the town is little less poorer. More people use bicycles, as all the important buildings (i.e. the supermarkets, hospitals, parks, offices) are close together with almost 30 hospitals for a 15 km square area, meaning at most you need to travel 500 m for reaching a hospital. Thus there is absolutely no need for cars unless you need to travel very far.

4. What parts of your footprint do you feel is possible to reduce? What parts don’t?

I often eat packaged food even if we have an very own farm in Nellore. There is a point which we could reduce pollution and eat food from our farm. 

We can't reduce the size of our gigantic house, so we can't reduce our footprint that way.

We could also reduce the amount of trash we generate. Since our school is very near, I actually shouldn't use a car to go only 2 km. I probably must use my bicycle. But the only problem is traffic.

5. What do you think are the limits and possibilities in affecting climate change by the reduction of individual footprints?

I always feel the first possibility we could do is plant more trees. With 5 billion trees being cut every year and 7.5 billion people on Earth, it is safe to say that even if 1 person plants 1 tree every year, our ecologic footprint would be balanced. (Personally, i plant about 30-40 trees an year but only 5-6 of them grow successfully as there is no place near our house in Hyderabad).

With companies and factories producing more than 60% of CO2, we can reduce buying their products. This would lead to them to create lower amount of the products. 

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