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In 2018, a few entrepreneurial friends, Sam, Tom and Luke, decided to start dedicating their time to addressing the impending climate catastrophe. A few conversations later, and it led to Extinction Rebellion (XR) live-stream events. These occurred once a month and invited expert climate speakers to discuss all climate-ranging topics. Luke and Tom went on to be more involved in XR. Sam, on the other hand, felt that although there was a lot of goodwill and talk about addressing climate breakdown there was one significant component missing - CO2-reducing actions!
Sam could see friends were making positive changes but there wasn’t a way for them to be recorded, or for others to see what they were doing. After hearing that the most effective path for behaviour change is positive peer pressure - that people mainly change when they see other people doing particular actions - Sam felt that an app would be the optimal fit. After creating the global live-learning platform 8BillionMinds and having worked for NASA, he felt he had enough experience to launch the project.
Luckily, many others were thinking along the same lines, which resulted in the formation of an experienced and passionate team to create 'The Climate App'. You can learn more about the team members here.
What is The Climate App?
The Climate App will enable people to track their actions and progress in reducing their carbon footprint while getting inspired by what others are doing too. It will educate users regarding the most impactful actions to make, with simple steps in order to complete it as easily as possible. It will allow users to track their progress over time, and reward behaviour with badges and awards, similar to how running apps work. The real power, however, comes from when users see what their friends are doing too, to get inspired and motivated to make changes in their own life. It will be fun to use while sometimes even creating friendly competition to create positive change.
So it will make change easy - recording individual pledges such as going vegan, plane-free, or switching to a green energy supplier - inspiring not only yourself as an individual, but also your family and friends. So each action is multiplied, causing a virtuous circle of actions. Another aim of the app will be to track and show the global progress in reducing carbon emissions, comparing where we are now to where we need to be.
The app will crucially show our governments that we are all willing to personally be part of the change, demanding more action, and developing the support needed for politicians and policy-makers to make the right changes to the economy, policy and governmental structure.
Many of us working on the app are a part of the Extinction Rebellion movement and are passionate about curbing climate change. We understand the urgency of the situation and work with the knowledge that we have less than 8.5 years to cut carbon emissions. There is no time to waste, and we can’t wait to launch the app and build a movement as quickly as possible.
Where are we now?
We are about 50% the way through developing our MVP, and would love to create a crowdfunding campaign to raise enough capital to make the vision a reality.
Will you help us grow our community and our campaign towards people taking action to reduce their CO2?
If so, you can help make a difference by adding your friends and family to our Facebook Page and Instagram.
We will also launch a crowdfunding campaign if we reach 300 people who pledge their support - can you be one of these great people? If so pledge to support our crowdfunding campaign here! Together we can help turn words into actions,
Thank you,
The Climate App team