Photograph by Julia Ishac / Connected Archives
WORDS BY HANNAH SEO
I consider myself a climate-conscious person. I have been vegan or vegetarian for the last decade, I avoid single-use plastics to the best of my abilities, and my partner and I have recently started composting.
But how much can my little solo efforts tangibly achieve? I—and I’m sure others—would love to know. Getting a more concrete understanding of how much it helps that I forgo shopping online would genuinely motivate me more to hold steady in my lifestyle decisions. Recently I thought: There should be an app for this.
In a culture that is so overridden with mobile and web apps of any and all kinds, it seemed strange to me that there were no big climate apps in our general social awareness. A number of app-makers, it turns out, have gone through this very same thought process. And now a handful of climate or sustainability-minded apps exist today.
“Historically there have been no good tools for people who want more climate awareness in their daily lives,” said Sanchali Pal. Pal was inspired to found the climate app Commons, formerly called Joro, in 2019 after trying to track her own carbon footprint manually on a spreadsheet for a few years. It was clear to her then that an unmet need existed in the market for a tool that could give sustainability guidance that was actually sound and well-researched, she said.
Most climate apps will take you through an initial survey to calculate your carbon footprint, asking what country you live in, whether you eat meat, how often you fly, and so on, to approximate your annual carbon footprint. But features beyond that tend to vary.
In Earth Hero, for example, an app created and run by volunteers, users can find an extensive bank of actionable lifestyle changes to reduce their personal emissions alongside explanations for how they help. Actions like biking instead of driving or installing an electric water heater are dubbed “ambitious,” while switching to LED light bulbs or buying washable air filters are rated as “easy.” Each action is also ranked with an “impact” value ranging from one (using a refillable water bottle) to 100 (switching to an electric vehicle). “We try to help people find the things that are high impact but relatively easy for them to accomplish,” said Ben Gerhold, the app’s cofounder. Commons has a less expansive list of actions, but also features articles, videos, and quizzes to further users’ understanding.
Each person’s individual emissions vary depending on a number of lifestyle factors—whether they drive, eat meat, fly often, or shop excessively online. But these factors also fluctuate over our lifetime as personal circumstances change, and so it can be difficult to precisely calculate a carbon footprint from a survey alone. Commons tries to get more accurate emissions data by giving users the option to link credit or banking cards—the app calculates emissions from purchases made on those linked cards and tallies information about the category of the purchase into their personalized carbon footprint analysis. Commons also platforms climate-friendly brands, while explaining in-app those brands’ commitments to lowering emissions.
But “spending is not a complete source,” Pal conceded. The expense logged doesn’t give the app power to, say, observe how much wasteful packaging is included with the product, or the distance of the flight you just bought.
“Historically there have been no good tools for people who want more climate awareness in their daily lives.”
Having technology that can help people hold themselves accountable is a good and useful thing, says Christie Manning, a cognitive psychologist who specializes in environment and climate injustice at Macalester College. “There is psychological research showing that people pretty wildly misestimate what are impactful actions versus not impactful actions,” she said. “Assuming that an app is backed up by solid research, it could be able to give you easy and effective strategies that you might not otherwise think about.”
But Manning also wonders who these apps are really for. The people who are probably seeking out and downloading something like a climate app are likely already thinking deeply about climate change “beyond the things that an app has to offer,” she said. In other words, many of these apps might just be preaching to the choir.
After playing around with a few of these apps, I think there may be some truth in that. I’m not sure if these resources have given me a better understanding of how my personal decisions tangibly help the environment. I already know that public transit is better than driving, I am already motivated to minimize waste, and I remain skeptical of some of the shopping elements—would buying and shipping eco-friendly laundry detergent from a climate-friendly online shop truly be better than walking to a local store for typical detergent?
This line of questioning is perhaps too granular to answer. But Commons does say that their users in 2022 cut their emissions by an average of 20%. When some estimates attribute more than 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions to household consumption, that feels fairly significant. Some experts are doubtful.
It’s true that incremental progress is better than none, but “we’re headed off the cliff,” said Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist turned climate activist and the executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund. She points to the fact that the “carbon footprint” was the brainchild of British Petroleum to nudge people into thinking that individuals were responsible for climate change. Cutting the average person’s climate impact, even significantly, doesn’t achieve enough, she said. “If we only slow down just a little bit, that won’t stop us from going off it.”
Another criticism comes from the fact that Commons and other climate apps like Wren or Klima are for-profit ventures that rely on purchases or subscriptions for carbon offsets in the app. For-profit ventures by definition need to make money, and in the climate space, carbon offsets are where that money is—the market is worth billions of dollars. Commons and Wren make their revenue by taking about 20% of those transactions.
“Carbon offsets are not an effective way to spend money to prevent climate change,” said Salamon, and “I would encourage anyone who’s thinking about how to put their money to good use fighting climate change to put it toward grassroots activism or policy or legal movements.” When activists succeed in helping a piece of legislation get passed, the monetary donations put toward supporting them, even if you attribute just 1% of the policy’s success to activism, is a huge return on investment, Salamon said.
“It’s good to be skeptical of these offset projects, and we are,” said Pal. “It’s important to be discerning about the quality of carbon offsets… and Commons has rejected more than 80% of the projects that try to partner with us.” She also emphasized that investing in climate solutions projects will help us all hit our 2050 climate targets.
“None of these apps are going to do any good if nobody is using them, no matter how brilliant they are.”
Salamon also worries that apps that focus on individual action might suggest to users that these lifestyle changes are sufficient to stop climate change. Individuals are also prone to “single action bias,” said Manning, where people take one step to counter a problem they’re worried about, and that alleviates all sense of urgency—“I’ve recycled now, so I can relax.”
Getting people involved in climate action is thought to involve several stages, said Manning. People have to first notice climate change is a problem and then interpret it as an emergency that requires urgent action. Then, they have to feel a personal sense of responsibility to take action. This can include action in your individual life, but also realizing that “we are the people who hold governments and corporations accountable,” said Manning.
Where an app can be helpful, said Manning, is in the final stages—helping people know what to do with their newfound desire to act, and encouraging accountability to actually take those steps. Having informative directions can keep you moving, she said—but ideally, this would also include directions on how to join with organizations or groups for collective action. Earth Hero does this, to some extent, with a “Community” tab that links out to various organizations’ websites.
Technology and social media can be useful for helping shift cultural norms around climate behavior. “We are social creatures,” said Manning, “we set our own goals and our own personal norms of behavior, based on what we see around us.” Talking to friends and family and nudging people in the right direction can have hugely influential ripple effects, she added. These actions won’t show up in your carbon emissions tally, but they do a real amount of good.
But this is not necessarily a role for climate-specific platforms. “We want to keep conversations about climate activism in public spaces and in public forums where nonactivists can also access them,” said Salamon—that’s how the movement spreads.
Gerhold and Pal both defend the role of apps in creating both individual and communal change. Apps can help fold individuals into bigger actions, creating a sense of “rowing the boat in the same direction together,” said Gerhold. If apps encourage individual action, that’s still important, said Pal, because “individual action leads to collective action.”
Plus, apps are a “relatively easy, scalable way to reach a lot of people,” said Gerhold, and engage people in a personalized way that meets them where they are. Apps are also easy to incorporate into day-to-day life, said Pal: “They’re immediately accessible, which is a pretty unique advantage for a tool for education and engagement.”
None of the climate apps in app stores today are “blockbusters”—at least, not yet. Gerhold said Earth Hero has more than 100,000 users in more than 150 countries. Pal said Commons has “tens of thousands.” As Manning said, “none of these apps are going to do any good if nobody is using them, no matter how brilliant they are.”
I’ll admit, none of these apps sold me completely, and I’ve already deleted them from my phone. What I want is a way to be held accountable for and encouraged to keep my commitments to the climate and a tool to preemptively guide me to more climate-friendly options instead of retroactively tallying my sins. I’m not sure an app can give me that. But who knows? Technological breakthroughs are tough to predict—and I hope I’m proven wrong.
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