Want to know what you can actually do about climate change? Here's a simplified, step-by-step playbook. You'll find much more detail across the Go Green Granville website and other online resources, but this is a shortcut to get you from wondering to acting.

Everything on this list is something you can do personally, with no need to wait on federal, state, or local policy.  

The playbook is based on the typical greenhouse gas footprint of one person living in a home in Granville. Add a second person to that home, and the household total rises only about 50% — not 100% — because heating, base electric load, and the home itself don't scale with occupancy. The real increases come from an added vehicle and roughly double the food, clothing, personal services, and discretionary spending. 

A typical single person, living in a standard standalone home in Granville, Ohio, has a total carbon footprint of approximately 16 to 18 metric tons of CO₂e per year.

Because Ohio relies heavily on a mix of natural gas and coal for its electric grid and winter heating demands are high, our location skews our housing-related footprints higher than the global or national averages. 

Let’s take a look at our typical emission sources, some reduction tactics, and the resultant impact. The reduction tactics listed below are all practical, and within your ability to get done without any local, state, or federal policy changes (or new technology breakthroughs). These actions are addressed in much greater detail in other places on the Go Green Granville website, and for brevity, will not be repeated here.

Sustainability and community resilience are distinct but deeply intertwined concepts, as explained below:

Sustainability focuses on long-term stewardship. For example, managing natural resources wisely, reducing/eliminating negative environmental impacts (with a substantial focus on greenhouse gas reduction), enhancing economic and social well-being, and ensuring that the critical personal and community decisions we make today enable future generations to thrive. Adding grid-connected solar to your home is a good example of a sustainability action.

Community resilience, by contrast, is about adaptive capacity. For example, the village’s ability to adequately support the needs of residents and businesses in the wake of external shocks, such as an economic downturn, a severe weather event like a flood or tornado, and/or loss of one or more critical services (including water, sewer, electricity, natural gas, emergency response, fresh air). Adding solar to your home, along with a battery back-up that allows you to maintain power when your local grid goes down, is a good example of a resilience action.

Sustainability and resilience stand alone, and overlap. The key distinction is in orientation. Sustainability asks “are we living within our means over time?” while resilience asks “can we recover and adapt when things go wrong?” In practice, pursuing one almost always strengthens the other, making them more complementary goals than competing ones. For more examples of sustainability, resilience and shared-impact projects, see the Venn Diagram below: