Where your footprint comes from
Estimated impact by lifestyle category
Your impact, in perspective.
Understand your footprint. Explore what you can change.
Estimated footprint
Your chosen target
Potential reduction
From your current scenarioDaily impact
kg CO₂e per person / dayCO₂ equivalent
A pathway to lower impact
Five-year projection, assuming gradual adoption
Your scenarioUnchanged habitsDashed: your target
Modelled pathway, not recorded history or a prediction.
Your next moves
Prioritised by estimated annual carbon savings
Build your personal baseline
Start with the example below, then replace it with your own activity. All inputs are annual unless labelled otherwise.
Changes save automatically on this browser. No account or upload required.
Your live estimate
tonnes CO₂e / year / person
A personal planning target, not a certified climate-aligned allowance.
What if you changed a few things?
Adjust reductions relative to your current baseline. Changes are combined once within each category.
Your possible footprint
tonnes CO₂e / year
Baseline vs. scenario
| Category | Baseline / year | Scenario / year | Reduction |
|---|
Your saved comparisons
Snapshots are local records, not measured progress.
Transparent by design
How EcoLens estimates your footprint
Activity × emission factor = estimated kilograms of CO₂ equivalent (CO₂e). One tonne is 1,000 kg. Annual values are divided by 12 for the monthly view and by 365 for the daily view.
| Component | Calculation and boundary |
|---|---|
| Car | Annual vehicle km × selected car factor ÷ average occupants. EV electricity is included in its per-km factor: exclude vehicle charging from home electricity. |
| Rail & flights | Passenger km × factor. Flight km must include every leg. The illustrative flight factor includes a simplified allowance for non-CO₂ effects. |
| Home | (Household electricity kWh × electricity factor + gas kWh × gas factor) ÷ household size. |
| Food | Daily diet estimate × 365. Broad dietary proxies, not nutrition advice or a meal-level life-cycle assessment. |
| Shopping | Monthly non-food goods spend in GBP × 12 × spend factor. Exclude energy, transport and food to avoid double counting. |
Factors & uncertainty
The defaults are rounded educational assumptions, not a verbatim government factor dataset: petrol car 0.21, diesel 0.20, hybrid 0.14, electric 0.06 kg/vehicle-km; rail 0.035 and flights 0.20 kg/passenger-km; electricity 0.20 and gas 0.183 kg/kWh; shopping 0.30 kg/£. Diet proxies: meat-rich 7.2, mixed 5.5, pescatarian 4.2, vegetarian 3.8, vegan 2.9 kg/day. You can replace the core factors in Advanced.
The displayed ±25% range is an illustrative sensitivity band, not a statistical confidence interval. Actual uncertainty may be larger, especially for diet, shopping, aviation and electricity. Shared infrastructure, public services, housing construction, vehicle manufacture and many services are excluded. Offsets and renewable tariffs are not deducted.
Scenario logic
Driving reductions replace trips with walking or cycling; no replacement emissions are modelled. Flight reductions remove flight distance. Home reductions scale household energy use. Diet and shopping sliders directly reduce their estimated emissions. Savings assume these reductions are achieved and do not include rebound effects or financial costs. The five-year chart linearly phases the scenario in over five years, holding emission factors constant.
Reference material
Use UK Government conversion factors for detailed, year-specific energy and transport factors. Explore Our World in Data’s food-impact research for life-cycle comparisons and the limitations of averages. These references provide context; EcoLens is not endorsed by either source.
Your data
Your inputs and snapshots stay in local browser storage on this site. Export CSV to keep a copy. Clearing browser data removes them. Different devices and website domains have separate records.