Environment Forum

Carbon Footprint Calculators

Kenyan blogger Juliana Rotich is the editor of Green Global Voices, which monitors citizen media in the developing world, and is a regular contributor to this page. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content – the views are the author’s alone.

Last month, GV environment looked at Maps, online communities and carbon footprint calculators. Since then there have been more calculators released, and in this post we list some of these new tools for the public to calculate their CO2 emissions.

PEIR – Personal Environment Impact Report
PEIR is not only a carbon footprint calculator, it is a more advanced version of it, giving you a detailed and personalized report about your environmental impact and also your exposure. It uses the GPS (Global Positioning System) capability and the accelerometers on the mobile phones to collect data. When speaking about the environment, particulate matter in the air (smog) and even other choices that we make about what food to eat can be influenced by what we see around. It helps the user to consider more factors than just CO2 emissions. If you were aware of the number of fast food restaurants in your area, would that affect the choices you make?

The PEIR was developed by the Center for Embedded Network Sensing at University of California, and it is currently in private beta testing.