Name: Can gaming apps help us reduce our carbon footprint?
Uploaded: 2022-05-02
Duration: 6 min 12 s
Description: App makers hope they can encourage eco-friendly habits by making it fun to track and reduce carbon footprints.

App makers hope they can encourage eco-friendly habits by making it fun to track and reduce carbon footprints.

Can gaming apps help us reduce our carbon footprint?

Environment

the problem we're trying to solve is that we have to reduce global emissions by 40 to 50% in the next eight years so that we can hit our global targets by 2030 and then hit our net zero targets by 2050. And of course we need sweeping policy change. We need companies to be making different choices. We need infrastructure investment, but there's also ways that we, as consumers can accelerate the pace of change. A lot of the changes that need to happen are very, very big structural changes. But obviously there is an element there of behavioral change, what we eat, how much we waste, how energy efficient our homes are. There are things there that we can control, what is our target outcome in this case it's pro environmental behaviors, advantage of games and apps is that they can break down those really big behaviors into achieved football. My name is Katherine Dunn. I am a journalist and I live in London in the UK. I've been an energy reporter in particular, but also kind of a climate reporter for years. I was an editor with Fortune for about three years where I mostly covered climate change and I'm really interested in what it takes for countries. What it takes for economies companies and people to actually kind of meet the goals that we've set out for ourselves when I wake up in the morning. The first thing I have to do is bring my dog for a walk and on that walk. My favorite thing to do is to get a little coffee and stand in the park watching my dog run around barking at all the other dogs causing chaos come in completely ignoring me. How hard is it to bring in a reusable cup, You can see all these little like frictions there where I'm like, okay, I have to find the cup inevitably, I've left it in the bottom of the bag and it's disgusting. I mean it seems kind of crazy that a reusable cup is just such a simple change that you can make and yet I still struggle with it. The problem is that people don't know where to start when it comes to climate change. And so if you want to understand what you can do about climate change, starting with measuring your own personal carbon footprint, probably the best thing to do. So the carbon footprint in simple terms is the carbon connected to anything you do, anything you eat the transit you took that day, the energy used in your home on one level, it's pretty simple, it's the carbon you're kind of responsible for as an individual, but once you start to think about it, you realize that it is like the sum total of everything you interacted with that day, luckily now there are apps for that the climate agenda and changing your behavior, these are tough, long term things to do and so we all need a little bit of support. My name is christian arno Founder of paw prints an app that helps you reduce your carbon footprint, my name is essentially paul and I'm the founder and ceo of Zorro, Zorro is an app that helps you use the power of your spending to take action on climate change. There's a few ways we use Gamification, um one is that your own emissions, you sort of see that progress over time, you can also see your progress versus others, there's the leaderboard and in the context of separate people into teams, I would be more likely to do something because I wouldn't want to let you down. Part of it is making sure that individuals find financial value and and other personal value in it as well. One of the most challenging things about climate change and about carbon is that they're invisible and distributed and Gamification is a way of making that feel immediate and satisfying to someone when they make progress. Gamification is essentially anything designed to make a non gaming activity more fun. My name is Benjamin Douglas, I am a second year PhD student and psychology department at the University of Wisconsin Madison and we study pro environmental behavior and persuasive messaging, essentially behavior change. How do we, how do we motivate people to do things that they might otherwise not do on their own exploring is available, apps on my phone, what you can find even in the app store right now is a lot of apps that will help you calculate your carbon cost effectiveness of an app is going to depend obviously on what's in the app, so if you are using things like points and leaderboards and progress towards all those elements of Gamification, make people want to return and therefore more likely it's going to be successful. There is persuasive evidence that Gamification helps us learn, so it's more fun, then you might actually want to do it. And ideally you would do those to the point where you feel like you've kind of built up a habit, I absolutely think everyone has a part to play in keeping the planet livable. If you're spending money, then you have the power to take climate action. You know, we're only going to vote a few times in the next decade, but we do spend money 2-3 times a day. And so if you spend money, you know how to take climate action, if you have to draw up, we all have a stake in the future, but the reality is that many people in the world have more pressing concerns and that's why I think the reward element of which Gamification is a part is really important to achieving the widespread spread changes over the past several years. Been this increased anxiety and rightly so about the effects of climate change, really, we're seeing across the board is people trying to find any solution that will work. I think people are looking for tools to understand how they can change their emissions and tools to better understand their emissions as well. In a way that feels trustworthy Gamification is one that has potential and because it has the potential to work, you know, it's another area we can explore.