Question: Would you say that Australia is a eco friendly country?
Keywords: australia, ecofriendly, environment, place
Comments
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Thanks for answering :^)
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No worries jcubo3! That’s what we are here for 🙂
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I find that interesting because I thought we were pretty bad to the environment but I have never travelled overseas before.
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Hey I tried the footprint calculator and found out that my foot print was 3.3 hectares and that we would need 1.8 earths if everyone lived like me. Is that bad or good?
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Well considering we don’t have 1.8 earths (we only have one!) it is bad. But I bet there are people much worse than you! People who would need like 4 planet earths!! lol. Things you can do to reduce it further is turn off lights in your house when your not using them. Use the air con less. Switch off your TV / computer / etc by the wall socket when your not using it. Instead of taking the car somewhere close maybe persuade your parents to ride their bikes instead? Eat more vegetables and slightly less meat. Don’t waste any of your food. Eat everything on your plate (if its too much ask your mum for smaller portion sizes), recycle as much as possible and try to make eco-friendly choices when buying things. 🙂
Hope this helps!
I’d love to know my carbon footprint! Where did you find the calculator? Is it online?
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jcubo3
cheesecake
Yes and no. If we compare ourselves to some countries (like China), we seem very eco-friendly, but compared to Finland or Costa Rica we could be doing a lot more.
For instance, many European countries decided to make clear renewable energy targets decades ago. Iceland is powered by 100% renewable energy, where as Australia only uses about 10% from renewable sources. This has a lot to do with where the country can get its energy from, but we could do a lot better with the amount of sun that we get down under. Australia also exports a lot of fossil fuels to countries like China, so even though we aren’t burning the fuels, we are enabling other countries to become big polluters.
We have many national parks with laws to protect their ecosystems, but there is still a lot of land that is part of ‘state forests’ that aren’t as environmentally protected by law. You can do commercial logging in a state forest, but not in a national park. Protecting what little remnants of natural land we have left is very important environmentally. About one third of Costa Rica is protected national park lands. This is a lot!!
Some eco-positive things about Australia are that we have well-developed recycling systems for our homes and businesses and we have strong regulations surrounding the dumping of waste and general pollution by big businesses. People are also generally well educated in terms of ways that we can protect the environment, but now it’s up to our governments to make the big decisions to make us greener!
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I think Blaire answered this question really well. Australia are going in the right direction and yes compared to other countries are doing really well in terms of ‘eco-friendliness’ but there is still a lot more the country could do like create more national parks and marine reserves, reduce pollution into river systems, reduce water usage and invest in more renewable energies.
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No.
Our nation has only 21 million people that is the primary mitigating factor of our high per capita environmental footprint.
In green house emissions per person we are ranked 5th highest in the world! Above the US and 6 x China’s.
We truly are the lucky country with 2.15 hectares of arable land per person, almost double the number 2 position.
Another measure of our impact on the environment is our ecological footprint, or how much land area it needs to support an individual. There are 12 billion hectares of land available globally to support humanity, Australians use 7 hectares of it each. So if everyone on earth lived like Australians we could fit less than 2 billion people on planet earth!
Try:
https://www.wwf.org.au/our_work/people_and_the_environment/human_footprint/footprint_calculator/
I did and found out that my footprint was 5.3 global hectares! less than the average Aussie, but we would need 2.9 planet earths if everyone live like me 🙁
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