It’s easy to think that climate change is something bigger than all of us, that as individuals we don’t really have the power to change it.

Actually, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Each one of us is powerful and can play a part in making climate change a thing of the past instead of the future. Not convinced?

Five things you need to know:

  1. It’s all about our carbon footprint — the amount of greenhouse gas emissions we are directly and indirectly creating. The goal being to have as small an impact or “footprint” as possible. Studies show that we, the consumers, the people who buy things, are responsible for almost 70% of all direct and indirect emissions. Pretty staggering, eh? The emissions come mainly from three areas: transportation, housing and food.
  2. Let's talk about transportation, because most of us drive cars or use transport that requires fuel. A vast proportion of greenhouse gases come from energy, coal, and oil and gas companies all around the world. There's also housing. We need heating, lighting and ways to cook our food. And as we largely like to eat meat, our food accounts for nearly 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
  3. The painful truth is that each of us directly and indirectly drives and creates the market for things we want and need to buy. That means big companies will provide them because we will pay for them! Once we see how our individual needs and choices start to stack up we can see that it also means that each of us form a giant group that is powerful too.
  4. So the more we demand something, the more big companies sit up and listen — which is why we have burgers made of plants, cheaper and cheaper electric cars and more and more recycling. It’s called purchasing power!
  5. So the more we chose to buy products with smaller carbon footprints, re-use, re-gift, buy used instead of new, choose to wear warmer clothing at night — and the more we use less heat like generations before us who were more thrifty and owned less, the more we will each reduce our individual carbon footprints. And the more we will help our world!

The Earth may be massive but what happens to it really is up to each of us. So instead of "act locally, think globally," we really should update it to: "Act locally, impact globally." Because it turns out each of us is way more powerful than we thought!