Carbon Footprint
For the term "carbon footprint", the SDIA accepts the definition provided by the Cambridge Dictionary.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines carbon footprint as follows:
Someone's carbon footprint is a measurement of the amount of carbon dioxide that their activities produce.
The terms carbon footprint and environmental footprint often get mixed up but the terms have different definitions.
Environmental scientists Thomas Wiedmann and Jan Minx’s elaborate definition of the carbon footprint:
The carbon footprint is a measure of the exclusive total amount of carbon dioxide emissions that is directly and indirectly caused by an activity or is accumulated over the life stages of a product. This includes activities of individuals, populations, governments, companies, organisations, processes, industry sectors etc. Products include goods and services. In any case, all direct (on-site, internal) and indirect emissions (off-site, external, embodied, upstream, downstream) need to be taken into account. *(*Wiedmann and Minx, Ecological Economics Research Trends, “A definition of ‘Carbon Footprint’,” p. 5).
