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Sorry, we know you won't like to hear this, but one long haul return flight - such as London to San Francisco - has the same climate impact as the average UK home during an entire year. In other words, each hour you spend on the plane has a carbon footprint of more than two weeks' use of heating, lighting, hot water, TV or washing machines.

In most cases, the only practical alternative to flying long distance is picking a destination closer to home. That isn't always ideal, but it will help reduce your carbon footprint substantially.

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It's tempting to spend all the money we have or can borrow, but almost everything we buy has a carbon footprint. The CO2 emissions may be emitted where the product was manufactured, in China for example, but they're arguably still the responsibility of the end consumer.

Cutting down the number of goods you purchase by a fifth can take around 5 per cent off your carbon footprint. It will help also you to save up for green investments such as better insulation or solar panels.

Of course, spending less won't be greener if you simply shift to cheap products that are likely to need replacing more quickly than higher-quality alternatives.

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Turning down the thermostat is a bit of an environmental cliché, but only because it's such an easy and effective way to reduce energy use. Reducing the temperature of your home by just 1 degree can cut your heating bills by around 10 per cent - typically around £40 per year.

What's more, you probably won't even notice any difference. Reducing by 2 degrees, or as much as possible without making yourself uncomfortable, is even better.

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• Home & Garden: The Basics
  
• Heating & Insulation on BBC Green
  

If your home was built after 1930 then it probably has cavity walls - two walls with a gap in between. The gap helps reduce heat loss, but it doesn't do this job particularly well unless it's filled with insulating material.

Adding insulation to cavity walls is a quick and simple job - the material is hosed into place through small holes drilled in the exterior wall. It costs around £500, but a typical family can expect to save around £90 on heating bills each year, as well as 750kg of CO2 emissions.

• How to... install cavity wall insulation
• Heating & Insulation on BBC Green

Besides helping us reduce the waste we send to landfill, recycling helps cut our carbon footprints. That's because it almost always takes more fossil fuel to extract and process virgin materials than it does to reuse existing materials.

For example, it takes around 20 times more energy to make an aluminium drinks can from scratch than to make one from existing cans. So almost every time you recycle a product, you're helping to reduce emissions.

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Few appliances are as eco-unfriendly as tumble dryers, which use electricity to dry clothes that could easily be hung on a line or rack. If we all stopped using and buying tumble dryers, we'd each reduce emissions by the equivalent of driving more than 500 miles each year.

• Gadgets & Appliances on BBC Green
  
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No matter what type of car you own, you can probably trim its emissions and fuel costs by around 15 per cent just by changing your driving habits. Most importantly, avoid speeding on motorways - driving at 60mph is much greener than driving at 70, which is much greener than driving at 80.

In addition, accelerate slowly and evenly, cut back on air-con and don't carry heavy cargo unnecessarily. Idling should also be avoided - if a car is stationary for more than around ten seconds, it's usually greener to turn off the engine.

• 60 second guide to... Transport emissions
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• Mythbuster: Green Cars

Compared with other foods, animal products carry a large carbon footprint (or should that be hoofprint), especially when it comes to beef, lamb and dairy. It's not just that meat is energy intensive to produce. It's also that cows and sheep belch up large volumes of methane, a greenhouse gas around 25 times more potent than CO2.

The average Brit could cut the emissions of their diet by around a fifth by reducing their consumption of animal products by 50 per cent.

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Old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs are hugely wasteful - 80 per cent of the energy they consume is lost as heat. They're also short-lived.

Modern low energy alternatives are available in all shapes and sizes, and produce plenty of pleasant, flicker-free light. One low energy bulb can save you more than £50 in electricity bills - and more than 200kg of CO2 - during its lifetime of 6-10 years.

So replacing all your bulbs with eco-friendly models is an environmental and economic no-brainer.

• Mythbuster: low energy lights

Water heating accounts for a quarter of energy use in the typical UK home, so using less is an effective way of cutting back on carbon emissions.

One obvious way to do this is to favour showers over baths - perhaps reserving the latter for when you really need to relax. If you replace two to three baths with showers each week, you'll reduce your carbon footprint by around 130kg.

• Give your bathroom an eco makeover