climateXchange

Post edited 12:16 pm – January 9, 2011 by marea

When you dig deeper into this report, it becomes clear that the main reason for the increase in Canberra's ecological footprint is the growth in consumption of goods and services in line with the increase in incomes of Canberra households in the past decade (both incomes and consumption have risen more in Canberra than in other parts of Australia).

However, the greatest single contributor to Canberra's ecological footprint remains electricity supply, which contributes 12% of the total, far outstripping the next largest contributors to our footprint: residential building construction (6%), retail trade (6%), hotels, clubs, restaurants and cafes (5%), air and space transport (4%), and petrol (4%).

On a positive note, there has been a 6% drop in emissions from electricity use per Canberra household between 2003-04 and 2007-08 and a 7% fall in natural gas usage over the same period. Therefore, continuing to focus on reducing our electricity and natural gas consumption can make a huge difference to Canberra's ecological footprint.

Residential building construction ranks second due mainly to the forest area needed to grow timber for construction as well as the carbon footprint of generating energy used in construction. The high ecological footprint created by retail trade is mainly due to the fuel consumption of the vehicles used to distribute the goods and the electricity used in shops. Petrol and aviation fuel use is a significant cause of our high footprint in air and land transport. On a positive note here too, the report finds that fuel use in passenger cars seems to have plateaued in the last few years.