It has become fashionable to say that carbon footprinting was invented by a large oil company in 2004 as a greenwashing exercise - passing the buck for greenhouse gas emissions from producers to consumers.
In fact, the concept of the Ecological Footprint was developed by Mathis Wackernagel and Bill Rees in the early 1990s. Quaker Green Action - which merged with living Witness in 2008 - published a climate calculator based partly on the ecological footprint methodology in 2003.
We've used the calculator in different ways, and for a while it was available as an online tool on the Britain Yearly Meeting website. However, footprinting is easily misused - to come up with a personal "goodness" score, or to allocate blame or to compete. This is more likely to happen with online calculators where you cannot see the working, or the contribution of the different elements of the footprint.
Our climate calculator is intended to inform you - to show you which of your choices contribute most to global heating, and where you have opportunities for action. It is available as a PDF document, printable as a double-sided A4 sheet. It was last updated in 2021.