What difference does it make?
If you’ve ever quietly wondered whether it’s really all that crucial to the environment if you turn down the temperature on your washing machine, or if you ever asked yourself how much of an impact it really made that you switched energy providers, a paper has just been published that might have some answers for you.
Available as an open access IOP publication, the paper considers recommendations governments from various developed countries (with a focus on English speaking countries) for reducing CO2 emissions and looks at how much of a difference the choices that we can make as individuals really make. It’s an interesting read that cites many other studies so if you want to read up on something more in depth, there’s plenty of material. Conversely, if you just want the emissions reduction impact results in a nutshell, just look at figure 1 (there’s a high resolution button).
One thing I particularly appreciated about the paper is that they’ve specified the impact that a life choice has depending on the country you live in: going vegetarian has more than twice the impact in New Zealand than it does in the Netherlands.
Of course, this is a hugely complex topic, and only looking at reduction of CO2 emissions (rather than also taking into account pollution and other factors) might seem very limited, but it’s great to see someone actually taking the time to explain exactly what the numbers mean and where they come from, so you can decide for yourself whether they’re relevant and representative for you or not.
As the authors of the paper put it, “the first step to understanding cumulative impact is to know the effectiveness of the action for a single person” – and that’s certainly just become a little bit easier.