Carbon footprinting: a tool for environmental management

The term ‘carbon footprint’ has become tremendously popular over the last few years and is now widely used in educational institutes, government, business and the media. Although the term has been extensively used in the public domain, there is an apparent lack of academic definitions of what exactly a ‘carbon footprint’ is meant to be. Considering the fact of climate change, the term carbon footprint is in strong demand. It is concerned with a less rigorous, consumer oriented, popularised concept of greenhouse gas reductions for the purpose of marketing the benefits of less emission intensive products and services to the public. Numerous approaches have been proposed to provide estimates, ranging from basic online calculators to sophisticated life-cycle analysis or input-output-based methods and tools. By the time elapse, there has been growing concern for issues related to climate change by describing interpretation of greenhouse gas measurement and reduction. The purpose of this paper is to define “carbon footprint” and to provide an insight into the terminologies and approaches included within this concept.

Highlights

• The United States contributes 25 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases.

• Many ‘carbon calculators’ are available to help people work out the carbon footprints

• Ecological footprint concept is widely used as a resource management

• India's contribution to global carbon credit trading has been estimated at around $1 billion in year 2011.