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Vlahi natureschool's green calculator

Humanity consumes natural resources and produces waste. With the increase of the world population the consumed resources and produced waste increases as well. Today the world needs one year and six months to restore what we consume in a year. In practice since 1970, we live “in debt” (Ecological overshoot) and every year the day that we take another credit from nature occurs earlier (Overshoot day - the day we exhaust the annual bio capacity of the Earth).

Our planet is our home. Like every household, the inhabitants of the planet must be strictly keeping and carefully monitoring their budget. In environmental terms it has two columns: bio capacity and ecological footprint.

Theory time!!!

Bio capacity is the planet\'s ability to regenerate natural resources. Only the biologically productive part of the planet can create and restore resources and absorb the waste produced by human activity. The rest of the planet consisting mainly of deserts, glaciers and sea bed recovers for too long periods. The ecological footprint is a unit area (biologically productive land and sea) that people use to get the resources they consume and which absorbs the CO2 emitted from human activity and the accumulated waste.

Math time!!!

It is estimated that biologically productive area of Earth is about 12 billion hectares out of the total 51 billion. The indicator we use to measure the ecological footprint is called global hectare and represents an area of 1 hectare with average planet biomass productivity. To understand how much space is required for each person, we simply divide the bio capacity (12 billion gh) by the world population (7 billion). As a result we get the planet sustainable footprint - 1.7 gh per person. Unfortunately, today the global ecological footprint exceeds several times the sustainable footprint and in some countries leads to exhaustion of natural resources, environmental disasters with irreversible consequences, poverty, famine and war. However, not every country "owes" the nature equally, but because the planet is a single organism, we all feel the negative consequences of the imbalances that we maintain for years. In this sense, the ecological footprint is not just a number, not just what we want from nature but firstly it is the responsibility that we all share in terms of exhaustion of natural resources and deterioration of living conditions in our home – the planet Earth.

The tool with which we offer you to calculate your ecological footprint is divided into several theme sections where you respectively need to answer questions about:

  • General information about you (the calculator does not collect personal data)
  • The food and water we consume: what food prevails in your daily menu, how you get your food supplies
  • The home in which you live: what is its size, how is it heated, how many members includes your household, how do you handle the waste, what are your habits to save energy and water
  • The transport that you mostly use: what vehicle do you use most frequently, how many hours on average do you spend in it, how often do you fly,while you would be able to choose another mean of transport
  • Your personal habits: what are your consumer habits which directly or indirectly affect the environment.

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