Ecological footprint of our school
During the second collective activity of our teachers and students within Erasmus+ project “I am being an ecological person”, we have introduced the term ecological footprint. In the field of ecology this term has been used for some tim
„In the last 40 years, the pressure of the humanity on our planet has become a lot bigger than the nature’s renewable ability is. We would need one and a half planet to create the resources necessary for current consumption. That means that we clear forests faster than the trees can grow, we consume drinking water faster than reserves can refill, carbon dioxide is emitted faster than the natural process of setting in biomass or sea.” (source: www.croatia.panda.org)
According to the last Living Planet Report, which is the leading world scientifically based analysis of the health of our planet and the impact of human activity on the planet, our country’s ecological footprint is 1.86, the European Union’s is 2.6, while the humanity consumes the resources of 1.5 planets. And what is the position of our school in these numbers? There are many web pages with precise calculators for determining ecological footprints. We have chosen the web page www.greencred.me on which we have calculated our individual ecological footprints by answering the sets of detailed questions about everyday lifestyles. After adding up together we have got the results: students of our head school have got 3.97, students of our district school have got 3.95, and the teachers have got 3.5, which means that the average footprint of our school is 3.8 – far bigger than desirable. If the whole humanity would live our lifestyle, we would need almost four planets to meet the current consumption needs. By observing the individual results we see that the main cause for big footprints is frequent use of motor vehicles. On second and third place are poorly developed habits of saving energy and classification of garbage.
What should we do? We will get the answer to this question during our project in which the main goal is responsible environmental behaviour.
Croatian project member: Ivana Karpov
