/MyClimatePal

the easiest way to track you carbon footprint

Primary LanguageSwift

MyClimatePal - the easiest way to track you carbon footprint (@HackZurich2020)

MyClimatePal Logo

Inspiration

While we generally know that eating meat and flying hurts our climate, it is hard to take effective action. Is it better to stop eating meat or to take the train instead of an airplane? We believe that understanding the effects of your actions is key for improving them. This is why we build MyClimatePal to be the easiest way to gain a deep insight to your CO2 footprint.

What it does

MyClimatePal lets you easily track your carbon footprint multiple sources such as your food, your travel and your housing. Using data from recent research [1], it empowers everyone to directly see the consequences of their consumption and evaluate their daily choices. Further, MyClimatePal provides you with statistics, that help you to become greener.

How we built it

We aimed for a minimalistic and efficient user experience. To make tracking your footprint possible everywhere we built an intuitive iOS app using SwiftUI.

Challenges we ran into

Getting data on all types CO2 emissions is extremely hard. Not only are emissions dependent on so many variables, they are also often hidden, and it is often hard to find reliable data. Have you ever thought of the emissions from the constructions of your current home? To maximise the impact of MyClimatePal, we focussed to collect CO2 emission data on categories where small changes of each individual can really make a difference.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

While there remain many features to add, we believe that we have built a sleek app that is intuitive for everybody to use and already provides real value. As newcomers to iOS programming (especially the new SwiftUI framework) we are very satisfied with our result.

What's next for MyClimatePal

Making it easier for users around to track their emissions will be the main focus. From as giving the user the choice between the imperial and metric system to making it possible to automatically track their daily travels, there remain may features to improve the app. Further, we would like to cooperate with NGOs focussing on carbon offseting, to directly give the user the ability to compensate their emissions.

[1] Clune, Stephen, Enda Crossin, and Karli Verghese. "Systematic review of greenhouse gas emissions for different fresh food categories." Journal of Cleaner Production 140 (2017): 766-783. [2] [3] author={S. Clune and E. Crossin and Karli Verghese}, journal={Journal of Cleaner Production}, year={2017}, volume={140}, pages={766-783} }

Credit

Icon from Freepik from www.flaticon.com

Charts adopted from SwiftUICharts https://github.com/AppPear/ChartView