The deliverable aims to provide an overview of various types of footprints and environmental impact indicators and then review existing personalised carbon and environmental footprint calculators in detail with a viewpoint to assess their suitability for use in the I-CHANGE Living Labs (LLs). Additionally, it also discusses a few macro-scale modelling methodologies and simulation frameworks that can help to assess the impacts of changed behaviour on climate and environment. Environmental footprints and indicators to measure impacts are considered alternative methodologies to assess the impacts of human activities on the environment. The report provides an overview of both of them in detail.
With certain information collected from the I-CHANGE Living Labs about their activities, expertise, focus areas, tools and sensors used to collect data in the past and their planning during the I-CHANGE project, the preliminary proposition of related footprints and indicators for each LL was developed. Because of the universal nature of carbon footprint and also their wide availability and acceptance, the deliverable carried out an extensive review of existing open-access personalised carbon footprint calculators (in both forms as a smartphone app and web-based calculators). The multi-criteria analysis approach was used to obtain the list of a few most suitable calculators that score best in all major criteria.
Results show that calculators developed by government organisations are more robust and optimal to be used in Living Labs (e.g. Sitra, WWF etc.). Apart from that, the consumer footprint calculator is also discussed in detail as it provides output in terms of effects on impact category indicators. Within macro-scale assessment models, models related to personal mobility, energy consumption, air quality and climate change are discussed. A few selected models based on their relevance for the I-CHANGE project in each domain are analysed in detail along with their data requirements, outputs and their integration with each other to help analyse the translation of the effects of policy scenarios from one domain to another.
In case you are interested to learn more about the report, please send an email to info@ichange-project.eu.