Kent Portney: Our Green Cities Blog

I see that the City of Toronto has initiated a new project called “Zerofootprint Toronto.” This is a collaborative effort between the City government and a Canadian nonprofit organization called “ZeroFootprint,” located in Toronto.

The idea behind this project is to create a municipality-focused means for all residents and businesses to compute their own carbon footprints, and, in the process, incrementally build a picture of the carbon footprint of the city as a whole. This is a unique approach to carbon footprints—there are numerous footprint calculators available online, but this is the only resource that is specifically designed to aggregate the results of individuals within a city. So the idea seems to be to make this tool available to everyone in Toronto, where they can register for an account and login to get access to the carbon footprint calculator. As a result, the calculator does what most carbon calculators are designed to do, that is, to elevate peoples’ awareness about how much carbon they are responsbile for. But here the information helps the city to understand the footprint of the city as a whole. See the City’s web description of the project at Zerofootprint Toronto.

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