A survey of BCA members last spring revealed a lot of concern about our environmental impact. The list of BCA Best Practices provides a good starting point, as twenty of the actions can help reduce or eliminate our carbon footprint. I’ve created a further description of the best practices to help us to understand, measure and inform ourselves.
Knowing how each of us contributes to the current climate crisis requires some thought. We need to:
- create an energy budget for battery powered electrical devices on our boat that charge using fuel;
- measure and record our personal consumption of fossil fuel resources;
- estimate embedded carbon sources related to food and physical materials associated with cruising.
If you don’t know where you are or where you are going, then any course will do (i.e. some action is better than none). Taking action requires considering alternative sources of energy, such as solar and wind power, and predicting how best to capture and use them. Until recently, we lacked the tools we needed to do this.
New Resources
Check out the “Our Best Footprint” full article which elaborates on what actions we can take to make the biggest difference. The article is supported by the “Boaters Energy Budget and Carbon Footprint“, an analysis tool that can use your knowledge of your own boat, its operation, and your cruising lifestyle to measure your personal impact and the alternative energy sources you can use. A Zoom workshop using this tool is coming soon. These resources (and others) can also be found on the BCA website, under the tab Responsible Cruising > Resources and Tools.
Currents PDFs
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