Apps to track and offset your carbon footprint

Knowing your carbon footprint is the first step towards making more sustainable travel decisions.

While climate change is a global issue, there are steps you can take to help reduce your personal impact on the environment – every little bit counts. The first of which is to start tracking your carbon footprint.

A carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions generated by your actions. The bulk of individual emissions generally come from housing, food, and transportation. 

By tracking your emissions, you’re able to have a clearer picture of your individual actions. With this knowledge, you can make informed decisions about what parts of your lifestyle you might like to change, and how.

That could mean reducing your meat consumption, turning off your lights more regularly, or holding long-distance work meetings via zoom rather than in-person.

When it comes to transportation, Blacklane can help you to make smarter and more sustainable transport decisions. Blacklane was the first ride service to be certified carbon-neutral, for offsetting our entire operation’s emissions, starting in 2017. 

In 2021, we partnered with South Pole, a company that develops projects to reduce carbon emissions with the goal of becoming a net-zero carbon emissions enterprise by 2040. 

We’ve also been adding electric vehicles to our fleet over the past few years, as we work towards a more sustainable future in the mobility sector. By downloading the Blacklane app, you can travel more consciously.

When it comes to other parts of your life, tracking and offsetting your individual emissions can be made easy with these few apps. 

Klima

With climate app Klima, you answer a series of questions about your lifestyle and where you live to get an estimate of your individual emissions. This can then be customized further with their advanced calculator.

Once you’ve got an idea of your carbon footprint, Klima then sets up an offset subscription to fund any or all of their three main projects to help remove or reduce the equivalent emissions elsewhere.

The projects are tree planting, solar power, and clean cooking. Klima states on their website that their projects are verified through the Verified Carbon Standard, or the Gold Standard developed by WWF. 

Joro

Joro touts itself as your “personal sustainability team”, with an app that helps you to curate an offset portfolio to maximize the impact of your donations.

By connecting your credit or debit card to the app, you can track the emissions on all your purchases. The app estimates the average greenhouse gas emissions per dollar created by each product or service you buy.

Joro accounts for individual differences – if you’re a vegetarian your grocery bill will have a lower footprint compared to a meat eater’s – so you’re not placed in a flat-fee subscription model. Rather, you only offset what you buy, meaning if you emit less, you pay less.

Joro has six projects it works with, including forest restoration in Peru and a pilot open-ocean kelp farm in the U.S. that is working on capturing carbon.

Capture

This carbon offsetting app uses GPS tracking to make predictions on your daily travel emissions and uses a questionnaire to help track emissions from food.

Capture states that offsetting is a “last resort” when it comes to “plant-friendly living”, with the app’s first focus on helping you track and reduce your emissions.

According to their website, all CO2 calculations are based on recommendations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with its offsetting projects enlisted from Gold Standard and American Carbon Registry-verified sources.

There’s also a feature in Capture that lets companies gamify sustainability for their employees through an individualized dashboard. Employees take part in challenges like reducing single-use plastics and then log their success to compete for badges via a leaderboard.

offCents

One for the business travelers, this app only tracks your carbon emissions from transportation. offCents shows you the emissions for each trip you make, as well as a monthly total. 

When you avoid travel that is high in carbon emissions, you can earn CO2 offset credits, which can be put towards offsetting emissions from travel you can’t avoid. You can also purchase additional credit if you don’t have enough credits.

Projects supported by offCents include methane capture, landfill gas, and energy efficiency. The company states that all projects meet the standards set out by Verified Carbon Standard, Climate Action Reserve, or the American Carbon Registry.

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