Take the 2020 Climate Challenge

Are you concerned about climate change because of bushfires, your kid’s future, endangered animals, the drought, rising temperatures or all of the above? But are you also not sure where to start or how to define a 'sustainable' lifestyle?

The WWF have made a great quick and simple online calculator for working out the impact of your lifestyle with consideration of home, energy, food, waste and transport. 

The calculator takes 2 minutes to work out your impact with consideration of your fair ‘share’ of the planet’s resources - calculating your personal ‘overshoot’ day, which represents when your impact exceeds your share. Globally last year, this was on the 29th July, so we are consuming nearly 2 planets worth of resources each year on average (5 planets in America and I suspect a similar figure for Australia).

I used it to put together a few example pathways for different combinations that amount to ‘1 planet’ lifestyles, and set targets for me and my family this year.

Take a look at the tool online for all the details and definitions and to make your own specific pathway. There are also lots of tips for how to achieve these outcomes and advocate for change.

From playing around with the calculator, there is no single solution (i.e. PV panels, Electric Vehicles, vegan diets, zero waste or better buildings) but it is a combination of all of these strategies to varying degrees that is required.

The key trade off I found is between transport and diet as these are the most personally subjective, whilst 100% renewable energy and significantly minimising waste are things we can all do (and advocate our government to help us with) that have a significant impact so I have included these in all my examples.

It was challenging to make the options with larger homes, car travel and occasional meat eating achieve a 1 planet outcome with any budget leftover for flying, even with electric vehicles or public transport.

For these options (or where flight demands exceed the allowances available) I'd suggest ensuring any additional flights taken are offset with a creditable provider of carbon offsets. You could even offset your entire remaining impact and help invest in carbon positive charities or developments. This solution can't work for everyone however and will become increasingly expensive in the future so reducing your impact to a 1 planet (or near to) extent is the best thing to do.

The final example I included was pushing all the levers as far as possible, showing a 0.3 planet result for a vegan in a renewable energy powered off-grid super high performance home who cycles and walks everywhere exclusively. This is beyond the 1 planet challenge and shows this extent is beyond what is required and ultimately not what is being asked of us all.

It shows we can eat meat, drive cars, fly on holiday etc but we need to be mindful of the extent of our decisions, moderate accordingly and be careful with our excesses.

I’m going to share a few lessons learnt and progress updates on this one throughout the year :)

https://www.wwf.org.au/get-involved/change-the-way-you-live/ecological-footprint-calculator

For UK people, the WWF have a tool for you too but this isn't measured in planets and is instead benchmarked against the UK government policy for 2020 (in Australia we have no government policy...). Here it is: https://footprint.wwf.org.uk/

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