The Best Sites to Calculate the Environmental Impact of Your Life

Ever want to calculate the environmental impact of you life? Or want to know where I get all those stats about carbon emissions, water footprint, ecological footprint? Now there are plenty of them out there, but here my personal favorite water footprint, ecological footprint and carbon footprint calculators:

Carbon Footprint: CarbonFund.org

Of all the carbon footprint calculators out there, I really like the one from CarbonFund. The real advantage of this one is that it allows you to calculate the carbon emissions from your home, your car (including specific make and model information), train and bus journeys between just about place in the world, as well as flights (with or without radiative forcing).

Ecological Footprint: MyFootprint.org

Hopefully you've gotten the message that there's more to your environmental impact than carbon emissions. Calculating your ecological footprint is a more holistic method, and one of the best sites for doing this is MyFootprint.org from Redefining Progress and the Center for Sustainable Economy.

By taking into account all the aspects of your life, this calculator gives you your ecological footprint in global hectares of land — and reminds you that there are only 15.71 global hectares of land available per person. Based on current population and natural resource consumption levels we're overshooting the carrying capacity of the planet by 50%.

Water Footprint: WaterFootprint.org

Water footprint is emerging as an important calculation to make. Many areas of the world are already water stressed, and as the world's climate changes many more will have even less water available that they do.

The premiere source for calculating the water footprint of your life is (appropriately enough) WaterFootprint.org. That link goes to their extended calculator, which really goes into some pretty specific detail -- you need to know how many kilos of grains and vegetables you eat, the average length of your showers, and more -- and gives you a more accurate picture. If you don't have that level of commitment, there's also a quick calculator, which uses more general figures.

For the Really Obsessive: WattzOn

Want to really delve into the environmental impact of everything you own? Want to really get obsessive about this stuff? Then WattsOn is for you.

Calculating the impact of your life in watts you get a figure of the impact of your flying, housing, food, commuting, and all the items you own. It does take some time to input it all, but the pie chart you end up shows you your impact in a really simple way.

In my case, I find that my life is a 1,825 watt life -- equal to a wind turbine with 16' blades running constantly, 31 60w incandescent bulbs burning 24 hours a day 7 days a week, or 2 gallons of oil consumed ever day.

Compared to the average WattzOn user's 2,983 watts, I'm doing pretty well, but the impact of my flying -- I've take one roundtrip international long-haul flight and two flights within the US in the past year -- is over three times theirs. So there is a level of healthy peer pressure going on here.