Impotent. Frustrated. Anxious.

Like many Australians, I have watched this horror bushfire season and felt helpless in the face of such devastation.

It's also how I've felt for years watching warnings about the impacts of climate change get more urgent while Australia makes little progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet somehow, these feelings never made me stop and reflect on my own behaviour.

The role of climate change in exacerbating the bushfire conditions has been hard to ignore. ( Supplied: DELWP Gippsland )

I'd always thought of myself as reasonably environmentally responsible. I recycle what I can (even the soft plastic!) and mostly remember to bring my Keep Cup.

My family only has one car, and I've done some of my work commute by bike, on and off, for years.

Sure, we fly for holidays quite a bit to visit the family in Queensland and usually a yearly overseas trip — but, hey, we offset those flights.

But slowly the realisation has hit me that I can't sit around waiting for governments to do something, when actually, in my own small way, I am capable of doing something myself.

It was really driven home when I spoke to Jean Palutikof from the Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility about the impacts of climate change and what we need to do to reduce them while we still can.

"People are going to have to change their way of life," she said.

"There is this rhetoric about the Government taking action, but actually what that means is that people will themselves have to take action."

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Watch Duration: 1 minute 28 seconds 1 m 28 s Professor Palutikof says Australians need to take personal action

So this year my family and I have decided to change what we can — and that is our own greenhouse gas emissions.

Last year the United Nations Environment Programme said the world has done such a poor job of cutting emissions, that in order to keep global warming to 1.5C we now need to cut emissions by 7.6 per cent every year for the next decade.

So that's how much we are going to aim to cut our family's emissions by this year — 7.6 per cent.

We've got our target, but how to do this is going to be a learning curve for all of us.

To keep us honest and on track, and to share what we learn, I'm going to write about it in a series of articles over the year, detailing the good, the bad, and the really hard to do.

I also want to hear your tips, tricks and questions.

Setting the parameters

First of all, we need to figure out exactly what our carbon dioxide emissions are.

Luckily there are plenty of carbon calculators on the internet. I chose two different approaches so I could cross-reference them.

1. The Global Footprint Network's Ecological Footprint calculator. This is super user-friendly, has easy-to-interpret graphics and requires estimates of inputs, rather than exact calculations. At the end, it gives me an estimate of how many tonnes of carbon dioxide I put into the air, and also tells me how many Earths we would need if everyone had my lifestyle.

2. A calculator from a carbon offsetting consulting firm, Carbon Footprint Ltd. This asks for more specific inputs like how much electricity and gas I use, how many kilometres I fly each year, and how much I spend on food. At the end, it gives me my CO2 count and a graphic of what my carbon footprint is versus what it needs to be to avoid catastrophic warming.

I sat down with my eight-year-old daughter Scarlett to do both and see if there was any difference in results, and what we could learn from the different approaches.

The calculator results are going to demand some big household changes. ( ABC News )

The results

Spoiler — we got vastly different results from the two calculators, but I'll get to that in a moment.

In our family there is me, my husband Sam, and my two kids: Scarlett and three-year-old Nina.

My whole family is coming along on this mission. ( ABC News )

We obviously eat a different amount of food and Sam flies more for work than I do, but we've decided to use my individual footprint as a proxy for our household.

Next — what do we put in?

The more simplified Ecological Footprint calculator starts by asking about the food I eat, breaking down beef, pork, poultry, fish and eggs and dairy into different categories.

It then goes into household details like the size and material of your home. But the questions about electricity use and efficiency are pretty vague.

Also, there is no input for gas. More on that later.

It then goes into travel and fuel consumption.

It all takes less than 10 minutes and in the end we get our score: I emit 11.3 tonnes of CO2 a year.

According to this calculator, our biggest emissions come from "mobility" — flights, car and public transport.

If the entire world lived like me we would need 3.4 Earths, it says, to sustain that level of carbon pollution.

This is not the figure I expected to get. ( Supplied )

It also comes up with some helpful ways to cut down emissions, which I'll dig into in future articles.

So, onto the second calculator from Carbon Footprint Ltd.

This one asks for much more detailed information about electricity and gas bills, kilometres flown, car mileage and efficiency and public transport use.

I wasn't sure if I should enter my flights, all of which I already offset using the airlines' suggested programs, but I decided to add them because I was curious about what their carbon cost was.

I'm impressed with the detail required because, in classic Type-A form, I want an accurate number to work towards.

Finally, it goes to a tab called "secondary calculations" where you enter a dollar amount for spending on things like pharmaceuticals, clothes, hotels, banking and finance, education and food.

I thought asking about pharmaceuticals was a bit strange, but the calculator has an explanation:

"This is a measure of the emissions caused through the manufacture, delivery and disposal of products and services we buy. Most carbon footprint calculators ignore this part of your footprint, but without it you may risk under-estimating your total footprint quite considerably."

For food there is none of the detail about meat consumption in the first calculator.

Here you just have to enter your spend according to whether you are a vegetarian, pescatarian, low, medium or high meat eater.

The basis for the emissions it calculates comes from a British government department, so I'm not sure how closely they mirror Australia's secondary emissions costs, but hey-ho.

The numbers are in, and boy are they different from my first calculation.

This time I'm come up with a whopping 18.03 tonnes of CO2.

It informs me this is above the average Australian footprint of 15.37 tonnes and vastly above the EU average of 6.4 tonnes.

The home and food make up the bulk of emissions. ( ABC News )

This is how my carbon footprint compares. ( Supplied )

It also tells me the worldwide target to combat climate change is two tonnes.

I'm sure the reason this result is so much higher is that we have a lot of gas heating in our house and the first calculator didn't ask for gas use.

But wow. I feel guilty. And I'm also quite shocked, if I'm honest.

Yet I also feel galvanised, because at least I now know for sure that I have plenty of work to do and some idea of where to cut my emissions.

Also, even if the numbers aren't entirely accurate, I at least have a figure to work towards.

And by involving Scarlett and Sam in calculating the emissions, the family is fully on board as partners in the project.

I've already got some ideas for how to cut down, which I will examine in more articles in the months to come. This includes everything from the food we eat and how we travel, to things like where our money is invested and how we heat our house.

I'll keep you informed as I attempt to make sense of this myself, and if you have any thoughts please let me know too at @mad_morris.