Carbon Footprint is defined as the total amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted by an individual. You create your carbon footprint by the actions you take. Some examples include the amount of time you drive or how much trash you throw into the landfills. Even electricity creates carbon dioxide which increases your carbon footprint.
Applied Social Psychologists will look at data to see what is using the most emissions and alternative methods to decrease everyone’s carbon footprint. This would also include major organizations and companies carbon footprint as well although this post is more about the footprint created by individuals. Over the last couple years our carbon footprint has tremendously increased due to the advancement of technology and access to various sources. Although technology has become more efficient we have also become more reliant on it which results in a higher volume use.
There are ways that we can track our carbon footprint. Companies with the help of applied social psychologist have developed carbon footprint calculators where you can actually calculate your carbon footprint and how it measures up to people in your country. Below is a link to a carbon footprint calculator and you can see how you measure up!
http://www.nature.org/greenliving/carboncalculator/index.htm
We can all see how we impact our environment by taking one simple survey and look at how we can reduce our impact on the climate directly. We can take our own data and become psychologists in the field to come up with a method or idea to improve our planet.
References:
Schneider, F. W., Gruman, J. A., & Coutts, L. M. (2012). Applied Social Psychology: Understand and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.
I thought your post was interesting because your brought up some similar concepts to the ones I chose to discuss in my post, such as pollution and emissions, but focused on the carbon footprint of the individual, whereas I focused on the carbon footprint of the corporation.
I think this is a great example of why it is important for Applied Social Psychology to be a field well inundated with a variety of different people with different perspectives. Everyone has things they are passionate about, problems they want solved, and mechanisms through which to solve those problems. In the case of the carbon footprint, for example, both perspectives (a focus on individual responsibility vs on corporate responsibility) are absolutely essential, because the problem is so severe and because it manifests in many different ways and different parts of society. Someone needs to be focusing on educating people about how they can act differently day to day to reduce their carbon footprint, and, simultaneously, someone needs to be doing the same with corporations. It is important to attack such a big problem from every angle, and the best way to do that is to get as many people and perspectives on solutions as possible!
Schneider, F. W., Gruman, J. A., & Coutts, L. M. (2012). Applied Social Psychology: Understand and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.