Trend: Mobile Eco Applications

Innovative cellphone software now fulfills users’ wishes to adopt environmentally sound practices

Social meta-trends such as LOHAS show that people are willing to make personal contributions to address global environmental problems like carbon dioxide emissions, climate change, and resource scarcity. Now mobile phone applications make it easy to monitor the individual “carbon footprint,” compare it, and suggest how to further reduce it.

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Cases

Carbon Diem (UK)

A London-based start-up company has developed a mobile phone application called Carbon Diem, which automatically calculates the user’s carbon footprint. The software collects speed and distance data via the handset’s GPS system, from which it identifies the user’s mode of transport. To protect the user’s privacy Carbon Diem only monitors carbon impact, not specific travel routes.

Carbon Diem’s inventor, Andreas Zachariah, was frustrated by the long-winded calculations involved with other eco-calculators, and believes the user-friendly software can help both individuals and businesses reduce their environmental impact.

Carbon Diem received an award for innovation from the European Space Agency, and will hit the market in spring 2009.

mobGAS (Belgium)

mobGAS is a mobile phone application that helps its users to evaluate their daily contribution to the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Downloadable for everybody and available for a huge range of phone models, it enables its user to check out how much carbon dioxide is emitted by using electrical appliances or during a typical day’s activity, such as going to work by bus. Within a daily diary it saves the personal CO2 amount and compares it to the average weekly or monthly emission of a certain city or the world. mobGAS is provided by the European Commission for free and aims to motivate individuals to make a small contribution to the goals of the Kyoto Protocol.

Trend Impact
One of the only up sides of the rising price of oil as a result of resource scarcity is that it has shown that environmental problems affect us all. However, not all people are convinced that changing their daily routines in small ways can help to alleviate these problems, leaving the responsibility to politicians. Easy-to-use applications that analyze and compare individual activity in terms of environmental friendliness is one way to motivate people to put more effort into their earth-preserving actions.

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