---

In order to talk about carbon footprints, it's necessary to be familiar with the ecological footprint, and how these two terms relate to each other.

To avoid strictly defining these terms, as the definitions may vary quite a bit, it's often helpful to understand the general idea.

An ecological footprint compares the amounts of natural resources people use with an area of the earth, be it land or water, that is needed to replace these resources.

So, as the ecological footprint of humankind rises, it shows the increasing need for resources, and the decreasing capabilities of our planet to supply these resources.

As fossil fuels are a natural resource (and a very popular one), the carbon footprint is one of the biggest contributors to the magnitude of the ecological footprint.

Simply put, the carbon footprint is only a part of the global ecological footprint, but with no less importance.

The carbon footprint is actually the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.

 The quantity is expressed in CO2e, or carbon dioxide equivalents (an amount of the gas, or concentration of gas, that is equivalent to carbon dioxide's contributions to global warming).

---

The workshop

Actually, not long ago in August (8.8), the Global Footprint Network stated that humankind has depleted the calculated annual amount of resources.

A great and detailed report about the "Earth Overshoot day" is in the link below (from the official Global Footprint Network)

http://www.overshootday.org/ 

This tells us that we emit more greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, than the amount that can be absorbed by the earth's oceans and forests.

To raise awareness on this subject in my school, I've organized a carbon footprint workshop.

The posters for the carbon footprint workshop are glued all around the high school! (they were downloaded and printed from sites promoted by the Pinterest website below. All rights go to "Conscious Box"and 100Things2Do.ca)

https://www.pinterest.com/explore/carbon-footprint/

After talking about the carbon footprint, I've organized the students to calculate their own ecological footprinton popular internet calculators.

To calculate the footprints, most calculators offer a series of questions on everyday practices, such as diet, transportation and household chores.

Using one of the free calculators, I've calculated the average amount of all the 50 students that calculated their footprint.

The result I've gotten was 133 „basketball courts? – one of the many visual representations of the amount of earth's area the person that calculates is using.

41 basketball courts correspond to 1.8 gha (global hectares) and is the area of land and water the Earth can provide us with.

The average person uses about 55 basketball courts, while my highschool's students' average was 133, which goes to show the importance of education in resolving global ecological problems.

Further on, they've calculated "how many planets would be needed" if all of humankind contributed the same amount to the ecological footprint - also a very common visualization of the ecological footprint.

The average number of planets was 3.5 planets (nearly FOUR times the amount of natural resources available to us, which is quite alarming)

The workshop also included an overview of Bosnia and Herzegovina's ecological footprint (carbon footprint included) taken from the 2012 WWF measurements for my region, which you can see in the picture below.

(56 % Carbon Footprint)

The photo was taken from the WWF website link below (in Bosnian)

http://croatia.panda.org/?275011/dan-ekoloskog-duga

I hope that with this report I'll encourage others to calculate their own ecological and carbon footprints, and compare their country's WWF measurements to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Let's see which country's the greenest! :)

In the link below is a great WWF eco-footprint calculator you can use (it's for the UK but most of the questions are general).

http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/

I'm really interested in your thoughts and results! :D

Thank you (for reading this lengthy post).