Big Foot

The topic of the week was Environment. Coincidentally, I took Prof Laksh ‘Quantifying out Eco-Footprint’ in Y1S2. Eco-footprint would be good place to start for creating data visualisations.

Growing up, I was more familiar with the term ‘Carbon Footprint’, in contrast to ‘Ecological Footprint’. So what’s the difference? A carbon footprint is measured in carbon dioxide equivalents and tells you how much greenhouse gases in total were emitted. Ecological footprint is a measure for the amount of productive land and sea area one needs to support a particular activity, lifestyle, person, or a group of people.

Footprint Calculator

During my QR class, Prof Laksh asked us to find out how many earths it would take if everyone lived the same way as you. I couldn’t find my previous result, so I decided to calculate it again

https://www.footprintcalculator.org/ (you can calculate your own here!)

Earth Overshoot Day

If everyone lived the same way as me, this means that by this date (15 Mar), we would have used as much from nature as Earth can renew in the entire year. I was quite shocked (and embarrassed) to see the date being so early in the year. For comparison, Earth Overshoot Day in 2018 was August 1.

5 Earths

If everyone lived like me, it would take 5 Earths to sustain everyone. It made me reflect on my daily choices, my usage of electricity, my diet, my petrol usage. A Chinese proverb came to mind — “饮水思源” — which translates to “when you are drinking water, remember its source”. Although the proverb was talking about being grateful for one’s blessings, I felt that it was apt in this context, to be conscious of your actions.

Maybe the Calculator is Wrong?

The footprint calculator takes into account many factors, how much petrol you use, how many hours do you fly in a year, what is your diet etc. However, I found it hard to answer some questions as I didn’t know some of the answers.

I wouldn’t know the distance from Buona Vista MRT to Cinnamon College, or the distance from Cinnamon College to my home. Who would? Because we are not ‘trained’, or are not consciously thinking about how far we are travelling, it becomes hard for people to accurately answer these questions. Unless we take note of all our public transport travels and slowly calculate the distances of each travel — which is just too tedious (it would be easier to close the tab and not continue the footprint calculation)

Additionally, I feel that fuel-related questions would also be hard to answer, unless you are an owner of a car, and you take note of how much you’ve travelled and how much petrol was used. In Singapore, it is very common to hail a cab or get a Grab car, so how could we possibly know the fuel efficiency of these cars? Once again, the calculation is not accurate because of our inaccurate input.

Ending Notes for Footprint Calculator

I think the footprint calculator is a wonderful and brilliant idea. Not only does it give us an opportunity to reflect on our lifestyle, but it can also serve as a tracking system to see if we’ve made progress every year. Perhaps what needs to be worked on is the public’s consciousness and awareness of the distance they travel every week or the type of fuel they use.

Population Size vs Eco-Footprint

After calculating my own footprint, I decided to look at whether there is a correlation between a country’s population size and its eco-footprint (EF). I found a data set that included the total EF consumption and EF per capita. I took the top 10 most populated countries and Singapore and came up with the graph below.

I decided to log the total EF so it can be better visualized on the graph. The trends in EF per capita is way more interesting than the total EF of the countries. I will talk about some highlights that I observed.

China

Although China has the largest population size, the EF per capita is around 3.8 global hectares (gha). We have to take into account the many rural areas and villages in China, where their EF consumption may not be as high as those who are living in the cities. Therefore, while China has the highest total EF consumption, the EF per cap is lower than expected.

USA

USA has the 2nd highest total EF consumption and the highest EF per capita. USA is very developed and this high level of EF consumption is the result of major industrialisation, globalisation and technology. USA has about a third of all the airports in the world. There are thousands and thousands of flights coming in and out of the US, which contributes to the EF per cap. In terms of diet, I would expect Americans to have a bigger diet, with more processed foods and animal-based products. Additionally, being a bigger country, people would have to travel more (be it by car, or train, or bus) to get to places.

Singapore

The EF per cap in Singapore is higher than any of the top 10 most populated countries, except for the US. Having a small land, there is not enough space for us to grow organic food. Most of our foods are imported, which means it is more likely that they are processed foods. Although there have been more vegetarian and vegan food stores popping up, the majority of Singaporeans still eat animal-based products almost every day. In terms of housing, I am not sure if Singaporeans know what more they can do to make their house more energy efficient, other than using LED light bulbs, or what it means to have an energy efficient home. Although the government tries to encourage its people to take public transport, we still have a high usage of cars, taxis and grab cars. All these simple yet crucial factors add up bit by bit, resulting in a very high EF consumption per capita.

Working on Sustainability

So how can we move on from here? I don’t think it’s about raising awareness of the problem. Everyone knows about that. It’s about raising awareness on solutions, giving people ideas on what they can do, how they can do their part to reduce the EF consumption, to not waste Earth’s resources.

However, I think every country has their own set of problems beyond this environmental concern, and ultimately it’s about how the government prioritise these problems and choose which one to focus more on. For example, in Singapore, the government is focusing a lot of its resources towards health, waging war against diabetes, trying to make everyone more active. Nevertheless, we can all take initiative and ownership and do our part to reduce our EF consumption, without the government’s help to motivate and push everyone to do it.