Compare Your Footprint’s Mission and Vision

Compare Your Footprint was first developed by two colleagues at a small environmental consultancy based in the UK (Green Element) to help measure the greenhouse gas emissions of their clients and benchmark their environmental performances against other organisations in their industry sectors.

The colleagues realised there were no comprehensive greenhouse gas emissions calculators available online.

Green Element’s founder then employed a team of app developers who helped turn the stand-alone program into an online tool with the mission to make it not only possible, but simple, for any organisation (a business, NGO, charity, not for profit, public body, school, university, a city or council…) around the world to calculate and benchmark its greenhouse gas emissions, or ‘carbon footprint’ as it’s often known.

Green Element wanted to play its part in reducing the risks posed by climate change. Because anthropogenic global warming through the release of greenhouse gas emissions into the earth’s atmosphere is the single biggest threat to humanity and all of life on our planet. According to the 2018 IPCC report we need to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels to avert dangerous impacts of climate change such as droughts, tropical and sub-tropical hotspots, extreme weather events, food shortages and catastrophic sea-level rises, many of which will hit vulnerable communities and countries the hardest. Life itself will be at risk, not just lifestyle.

So the Compare Your Footprint team heard their Call to Action and acted upon it, and compareyourfootprint.com is the product. If organisations can measure their emissions and compare them against others in their industry, they can work to reduce those emissions and measure their reductions year-on-year, playing their part in slashing global warming and averting disaster.

With Compare Your Footprint today, you can already calculate an organisation’s carbon footprint online, benchmark the results in many industries, and download reports. You could be a supermarket, a global fashion brand, a water company, a university, an airline or a shipping company – all of your Scopes 1, 2 & 3 emissions are covered within the one app. 

BUT, we only have 12 years, according to the IPCC, before the first tipping point is reached.

And we have so much more to do…

We need to make CYF easier to understand by making the ‘user journey’ through the process more intuitive – and even make it fun to use so that people are encouraged to come back each year and check their progress.

Compare Your Footprint was built according to the GHG Protocol, but we need to have the algorithm and results reviewed by the GHG Protocol to ensure compliance with the standard and achieve the ‘Built on GHG Protocol’ mark. This will reassure users of the tool that the calculations are being done correctly.

We need to use the product to educate both adults and children, by rolling it out as an educational tool in schools and colleges, universities, libraries and other public places of learning. This would need educating the educators about greenhouse gases and using Compare Your Footprint.

We need to partner with organisations such as Cool Farm Tool, which calculates emissions from agriculture – a very specific and complex sector requiring many more input parameters and measurements than most industries.