Ecological Footprint Calculators

The Ecological Footprint calculators have a number of functions and roles. Depending on how detailed and accurate an estimation you want, you can spend anything between ten minutes and several hours calculating your Ecological Footprint.

The challenge that each of the calculators helps you with is to live and work more sustainably by setting targets for achieving Ecological Footprint savings - both directly through your own behaviour and indirectly through other peoples' or organisations' behaviours that you can influence. You might well find that you even save money (increasing the household or school budget, business profitability or reducing event costs) and improve your quality of life or business profitability, by examining your Ecological Footprint and undertaking actions to reduce it.

As measurement tools, the calculators also help you to compare the impacts that different activities or everyday decisions might have, whether they take place in your home, in your school or office, or in managing an event.

Before you start to calculate the Ecological Footprint of your self, home, office, school, retail or event, decide what it is that you want to measure. For example, if you work from home, you may not want to include your work Footprint in your home Footprint, or vice versa. Once you have decided, you can calculate the Ecological Footprint using the following calculators:

• Personal
• Home
• Office
• School
• Retail tenants
• Retail centre
• Event

In addition to calculating your Ecological Footprint, you can also calculate your greenhouse gas emissions and the impact of your car.

Background on calculators

The Personal, Home, School, Office and Event Calculators were developed in 2003 in a partnership between the Centre for Design at RMIT (Melbourne, Australia), Redefining Progress (California, United States) and EPA Victoria. They use both life cycle data of individual consumption items and national Australian Bureau of Statistics data on Australian consumption patterns.

These calculators were updated and enhanced in 2006 by the National Centre for Sustainability at Swinburne University (Victoria, Australia) and the Centre for Design at RMIT University, who also then jointly developed the Event Calculator.

The Retail Calculator was developed in 2006 through a partnership between EPA Victoria, The GPT Group, Lend Lease Retail and the Global Footprint Network.

Please use our online feedback form to report difficulties with any of the Footprint calculators.