Integrated New Year's Resolutions to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

The New Year is upon us, the time for transforming good intentions into resolutions. If you've been putting off good intentions to reduce your carbon footprint, now is the time to set out some small steps toward that goal. It's possible to reduce your carbon footprint without taking an uncomfortable or unaffordable plunge. Your effort will stand the most chance of success if you integrate your green plan with other goals.

When making a New Year's resolution to live a greener lifestyle, cast aside thoughts of solar panels and a new heating system and focus on day to day lifestyle choices. The more extreme approaches, while desirable, will doom you if both your budget and green commitment aren't primed to accommodate them. Promising to finally get a solar panel is a bit like committing to lose 50 pounds. Any successful dieter will tell you that smaller commitments are easier to meet and encourage continuing on the diet. The well-intentioned solar panel resolution will likely fall by the wayside if not at the research stage, once you figure out how major an investment it is.

So how do you make New Year's resolutions to reduce your carbon footprint that you are likely to keep?

Integrate Green Goals with Savings Plans

Try integrating your conservation goals with your savings goals. If you plan to save $1000 toward a vacation in 2011, define a set amount of that money that will come from lowering the thermostat or eliminating a few weekly car trips. Your sacrifice will not only do some vague good for the earth, it will directly help you to achieve a more immediate positive reward.

Integrate Carbon Footprint Reducing Measures with Exercise Goals

You can also integrate your green goals with your exercise goals. Exchanging a couple of car trips per week for walking trips is easily put off, particularly in cold weather. It's easy to justify the postponement by rationalizing that you aren't reducing your carbon footprint all that much anyway. But if walking serves the dual purpose of meeting an exercise goal and conserving gas, it's easier to motivate yourself to follow through.

Integrate Green and Social/Charitable Resolutions

Is socializing more or engaging in charitable work on your list of New Year's resolutions? It's always easier to live up to a group commitment than an individual commitment. Who wants to let the group down? So, integrate your green and social/charitable resolutions by taking steps to improve your carbon footprint in the context of a charitable undertaking. Or maybe instead of reducing your own carbon footprint, you can devote your energy to giving others the tools to reduce theirs.

Integrating your carbon footprint reduction New Year's resolutions with your other annual goals may give them the spark necessary to ensure they catch.