Method
Every number on your dashboard is derived from a published Danish source and an arithmetic step you can read. Where the data is weak, this page says so rather than smoothing it over.
Where you start
You start as the average Dane, because that is the only figure with real measurement behind it. Denmark's consumption footprint runs to roughly four Earths if everyone lived this way. Your answers then move you off that average — they do not build a footprint from scratch, because nobody has per-person data at that resolution and pretending otherwise would be invention.
Structural and elective
Each reading splits in two. Structural is what you carry by living in Denmark: public infrastructure, healthcare, schools, the shared grid, the built environment, the state itself. No answer you give moves it. Elective is the part your answers reach — diet, driving, flying, heating, what you buy.
The split is the honest part of this tool. For most Danes the structural segment alone exceeds a fair share of several boundaries. A tool that hid that would be telling you your choices are the problem, and they aren't — or not mostly.
What a fair share means here
Your share is the safe operating space divided by the number of people on Earth. That is the standard method — O'Neill et al. 2018, following the Swedish EPA — and it is the most generous defensible one for a Dane.
The room the rest of the living world needs is not deducted separately, because it is already inside the boundary. That is what a planetary boundary is: the space that remains while the Earth system keeps working — with its large grazers turning the soil, the insects that follow them, the birds that eat the insects, the diversity that lets an ecosystem absorb a shock instead of falling over. Subtracting habitat again would count it twice. Your share is small because the space was never all ours to begin with.
There is a harsher method in the literature. The responsibility principle allocates by equal cumulative per-person rights, so countries that emitted early and heavily must reduce faster. Under it, Denmark's remaining budget for climate and biosphere integrity is negative — already spent, a debt requiring restoration rather than merely a smaller footprint. We show you the equal-per-capita number instead. It is the kinder one, and it is already damning.
Why there is no total
Because the moment there is one, it becomes a budget, and a budget gets spent. Watch what you would do: no meat, so a flight is fine. It is Goodhart's law — set the metric and behaviour reorganises around it — and then Jevons' paradox, where the saving becomes headroom to consume more. Meanwhile the units genuinely do not convert. Nitrogen in the Limfjord is not carbon in the atmosphere. Habitat is not water.
So: 5 readings, 5 units, 5 separate answers. No total, no score, no balance remaining. If you want to know how you are doing you have to hold several incommensurable things in your head at once. That is not a UX failure — it is the actual shape of the problem.
What we won't put a number on
Nine boundaries, 5 readings. The gap is deliberate, and it is probably the most honest thing here.
4 boundaries get no personal figure. Novel entities— plastics, PFAS, heavy metals — has no agreed safe level at all, and no method exists to attribute a share of it to one person. CONCITO and DTU Sustain downscaled six of the nine boundaries to Denmark and refused this one outright. If the most authoritative Danish assessment won't put a number on it from this data, we have no business doing so either.
Ocean acidification is your climate load arriving by a second route, so scoring it separately would double-count you. Aerosol loadingis regional — a Danish resident's contribution is not what moves it. Ozoneis governed collectively and is recovering. All four are shown on your dashboard and left unscored, because a number we made up would look exactly as authoritative as the ones we didn't.
Where the numbers came from, in full
The awkward parts, verbatim from the source file rather than paraphrased.
Two official Danish baselines disagree. CONCITO (EXIOBASE 4, hybrid consequential LCA) says 13 t CO2e per Dane; Energistyrelsen says 10–10.8 t. The gap is methodological: CONCITO counts indirect land-use change, biomass burning and high-altitude aviation forcing, and Energistyrelsen does not. We use CONCITO's 13 t because it is the more complete accounting, because it publishes the category breakdown this tool needs to individualize, and because it is the more conservative of the two. Energistyrelsen's figure is not wrong — it answers a slightly different question.
Two Danish nitrogen footprints exist and they differ by a factor of nearly three: 73.3 kg N per person (O'Neill et al. 2018, MRIO-based) and 27.5 kg N per person (Aarhus/N-Calculator, farm-to-plate tracing). Neither is wrong; they count different things. We use 73.3 because the per-capita boundary we compare it against (8.4–8.9 kg N) comes from the same O'Neill downscaling. A footprint from one methodology divided by a boundary from another produces a ratio that means nothing, however authoritative each half looks on its own.
Structural load is not a constant we looked up — it is what the model returns when every answer is set to its lowest-impact option. So it is the honest floor of this model: what remains when you have done everything the tool lets you do. CONCITO's own scenario analysis is the check — they find an individual Dane can at best reach around 9 of 13 tonnes through lifestyle change alone, because public-sector and systemic emissions do not move. Our climate floor lands near theirs, which is the one place this model is validated against a published result rather than assembled from shares.
Region carries no multiplier of its own, and this is deliberate. A Copenhagener's footprint is lower than a Herning resident's, but not because of anything about Copenhagen — it is because flats share walls and heat, district heating is near-universal, and daily distances are short enough to make a car optional. Those are the housing, heating and car questions, which you answer directly. Applying a regional multiplier on top would count the same effect twice. So region only sets the starting defaults for those three questions; answer them and region does nothing at all. (Danmarks Statistik's LABY34 does publish emissions by municipality group, but at a resolution that cannot be attributed to an individual household.)
The nine, as measured
| Boundary | Control variable | Safe limit | Personal unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Climate change | Atmospheric CO₂ concentration; radiative forcing | 350 ppm CO₂ | t CO₂e / year |
| Biosphere integrity | Rate of species extinction; genetic diversity; ecosystem function | < 10 extinctions per million species-years | m² of habitat-equivalent land |
| Land-system change | Share of land converted to farming, cities and infrastructure | ≥ 75% of original forest cover remaining | m² of land |
| Biogeochemical flows | Human-added nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) entering the environment | 62 Tg N/yr; 11 Tg P/yr globally | kg N-equivalent / year |
| Freshwater change | Blue water (rivers, lakes, groundwater) and green water (soil moisture) | Deviation from pre-industrial variability on < 10.2% of ice-free land area | m³ / year |
| Novel entities | Release of synthetic chemicals, plastics, heavy metals, radioactive material | No release of substances with unknown Earth-system effects | not scored |
| Ocean acidification | Ocean surface pH; aragonite saturation | ≥ 80% of pre-industrial aragonite saturation | not scored |
| Atmospheric aerosol loading | Concentration of aerosols and microparticles (smoke, soot, dust) | Interhemispheric AOD difference < 0.1 | not scored |
| Stratospheric ozone depletion | Stratospheric ozone concentration | < 5% loss from pre-industrial 290 Dobson Units | not scored |
Sources
- Denmark within Planetary Boundaries
The load-bearing source. Downscales six of the nine boundaries to Denmark with explicit transgression factors, under two allocation principles (equal-per-capita and responsibility). Deliberately excludes novel entities, ocean acidification and ozone — and says why.
- Danmarks Globale Forbrugsudledninger
13 t CO2e per Dane per year with a category breakdown, plus the scenario analysis showing an individual can at best reach ~9 t through lifestyle change alone.
- A good life for all within planetary boundaries
Per-capita biophysical boundaries by equal-per-capita downscaling: 1.61 t CO2, 8.9 kg N, 0.89 kg P, 574 m³ blue water per person per year. Denmark's per-capita footprints on the same basis.
https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk - Planetære grænser
Framing, the six-of-nine count, and the 'more than four Earths' figure for Denmark. Not a data source — it publishes no methodology or citations for its own numbers.
https://rgo.dk/fokusomrade/planetaere-graenser/ - Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries
The boundary definitions, control variables and current state.
- Den Store Klimadatabase v1.2
LCA climate footprints for 540 foods, kg CO2e/kg, split across agriculture, iLUC, processing, packaging, transport and retail. Beef averages 74.8, pork 4.7, chicken 3.27, vegetables 0.2–1.3.
https://denstoreklimadatabase.dk - Global Afrapportering / forbrugsbaseret klimaaftryk
The other official climate baseline: 10–10.8 t CO2e per Dane. 60% of the footprint is emitted abroad.
- Klimaaftryk og ulighed
Footprint by income decile: richest 14.0 t vs poorest 3.6 t per person. Flights alone: 1.4 t vs 0.2 t. Consumption elasticity ≈ 0.8.
- Grønt nationalregnskab · Statistikbanken
Tables DRIVHUS, AFTRYK1 (consumption footprint, experimental), LABY34 (emissions by municipality group). SEEA-compliant; emission coefficients from DCE Aarhus. Available via the statistikbanken.dk API.
https://www.statistikbanken.dk - Nitrogen footprint of an average Danish individual
27.5 kg N per Dane per year — food 82%, goods 12%, transport 4%, housing 2%. A different method from O'Neill's MRIO figure; see NITROGEN_METHOD_NOTE.