tracking our carbon footprint
Do Your Part! for Climate Friendly Parks is the first interactive online program in the country that provides national park visitors and supporters with the tools to understand and reduce their carbon footprints and thereby help to protect our national parks from global warming. Do Your Part! is sponsored by the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) in support of the National Park Service’s Climate Friendly Parks program.
Do Your Part!’s interactive mapping feature lets you explore park goals and the progress park stakeholders are making towards those goals. Its carbon calculator provides the tools you need to understand your current carbon footprint and then set goals to reduce your impact. Its tracking tool displays progress in real time towards park and related group goals.
Explore
Explore the impact that people around the country are making by reducing their carbon footprints. Search for national parks and related groups by zip code or key word. See each park’s goal and their progress towards it displayed via our footprint tracker.
Calculate
Measure your carbon footprint and set your personal goals using our advanced calculator developed by ICF International for the US Environmental Protection Agency. Our calculator is region specific based on your zip code.
Join
Create a basic profile that joins your efforts with others around the country. If you are not already a member, just click join and create a user name and password. Once you have joined, your pledges will then be counted towards your favorite park. You will then have full access to the site and will be able to join groups, create groups, update your profile, save data in the calculator for later and much more to come.
Setting Goals
As participants work together to meet the goal, the footprints will lighten.
Do Your Part! is fundamentally a goal-based program. By setting goals and demonstrating tangible progress towards those goals, Do Your Part! shows that global warming is an issue that can be addressed.
Goals are automatically generated based upon the following standard set of criteria:
- The estimated number of people that visit a park
- Average per capita carbon footprint
- A 5 percent reduction in emissions per person per year (default)
- A 1 percent participation rate (default)
- Day of the year that the goal is set. (Goals will be multiplied by the percentage of the year that is outstanding to account for the time remaining to reach the goal that year)
While the process for setting an emission reduction goal is set, a national park can choose to change 1) The percentage reduction in emissions per participant 2) The percentage of the number of people in a given community that will participate. Note: we expect the participation rate to grow per year.
Background
Do Your Part! was developed as an expansion of the EPA’s Household Emissions Calculator. Built over the past 5 years, EPA’s Household Emissions Calculator represents a well researched and respected personal carbon footprint tool that is held to the highest international methodologies.
Calculator Assumptions
For an explanation of the assumptions and sources used by the Do Your Part! calculator, click here. Keep in mind that average per person emissions estimates or per capita emissions estimates are usually derived from national estimates of greenhouse gas emissions, which include greenhouse gas emissions from all sources in the U.S., including industrial emissions (emissions from manufacturing of goods and services). As a result, if you compare your estimates from the personal emissions calculator to per capita emissions in the U.S., they may differ significantly.
