Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
1053185 | Environmental Impact Assessment Review | 2009 | 6 Pages |
Carbon footprint models are increasingly being used to manage personal and household carbon dioxide emissions. Six models were compared for their suitability for use in Ireland using typical data for a household of three people. The annual household energy and transportation emissions ranged from 10,540 to 17,361 kg CO2 yr− 1 (mean 12,886; sd 2135) rising to a total footprint of 12,053 to 27, 218 kg CO2 yr− 1 (mean 18,117; sd 5106) when aviation emissions were included. This represents a potential range for individual CO2 emissions of between 4018 and 9073 kg CO2/person/annum, a variation of over 5 tonnes/person. The information provided by these models proved to be inconsistent and often contradictory. The high variability between models was due to a number of anomalies. When these were corrected mean household energy and transportation emissions fell to 12,130 kg CO2 yr− 1 (sd 805), with a total household footprint of 16,552 kg CO2 yr− 1 (sd 1101). Models vary in their complexity in terms of what is included in the overall estimation of emissions making a full analysis of the primary carbon footprint very difficult. When compared to current Irish conversion factors the corrected models either underestimated or overestimated CO2 emissions by approximately 10%. Current carbon footprint models excluded emissions from CH4 and N2O underestimating CO2 emissions for the household by 1.8%.