Celebrities, brands & influencers come together to tackle the internet’s carbon fingerprint problem.
Calling all brands, influencers & environmentally-conscious individuals. It’s time to make your websites and social media accounts climate positive with Carbon Fingerprint, a first-of-its-kind algorithm that hopes to become an industry standard in measuring and offsetting internet-related carbon emissions generated by influencers, brands and Big Tech.
In light of the recent IPCC report (2021)¹, we are left with a somewhat bleak and progressively worsening view of global climate change. In an age where the majority of news is communicated online and most people live their lives through a screen, there has been shockingly little research into internet-related carbon emission and even less into how this relates to the bigger picture of changing global climate. There was, however, an emphasis placed on businesses in this IPCC report, making the disclosure of ‘climate risk’ mandatory if we are to start meeting our emission-reducing targets¹.
What, exactly, does this mean? Well, talk is cheap — it’s one thing to propose a means of reducing carbon emissions but another to actually follow through with it. The first step toward better carbon-management within industry is having a way to measure and report on our carbon emission; our digital carbon fingerprint should be no exception. Equally, we need to develop the means by which influencers and individuals can account for and offset their emissions as, often, their influence can be just as far-reaching as any business.
Enter Carbon Fingerprint (CF), a start-up initiative working to make the internet climate positive by 2030². The Carbon Fingerprint tool was built by three friends, Matt Bird, Will Owen and Harrison Osterfield (who you might recognise from his lead role on hit Netflix show ‘The Irregulars’); it uses a first-of-its-kind algorithm and a handful of user-submitted statistics to calculate digital carbon emission and allows businesses, influencers and individuals to gain a better appreciation for the emission associated with their digital lives. In addition to the increased awareness for digital emissions, the initiative helps subscribers to offset their carbon fingerprint through a number of tree planting projects across the globe. Each month, enough trees are planted to sequester ~20x the amount of carbon emitted by a subscribers online presence, meaning that they can scroll through social media, safe in the knowledge that their accounts are ‘climate positive’.
Carbon fingerprint is more than an offsetting service though. With hopes to partner with academics and industry-leading professionals, to further develop and refine our algorithm, Carbon Fingerprint wants to create an industry standard for measuring, offsetting and reducing digital emissions. Now, more than ever, there is a need for the creation of a standardised (and globally accessible) means of measuring the carbon emission associated with internet use. We believe that the offsetting of digital carbon is a short-term solution to a long-term issue and with better integration of carbon measurement and offsetting into global business models, we hope that by 2030, Big Tech companies will be doing significantly more in recognition of their digital carbon fingerprint and actively engineer strategies to reduce emission at its source.
Why?
Social media has immense potential for creating positive change in our world. It has been the catalyst for countless social movements and serves as a platform from which we can raise awareness for issues such as climate change. But, little did we know, every like, share and comment also contributes significantly toward our planet’s downfall. For example, scrolling through Instagram’s news feed for one minute produces ~1.91 grams of CO2⁴ and based on user statistics, that means our collective use of Instagram generates more carbon than flying a plane around the world over 12 thousand times every day or driving a car around the Earth’s circumference 96 times each minute. It’s gut-wrenching to think that engagement on posts from climate activists such as Greta Thunberg would, unknowingly, cancel out a lot of their efforts to live sustainably and whilst Elon Musk tweets about the damages caused by mining bitcoin, the billions of interactions that happen on his posts and many others each day contribute massively to our digital carbon problem.
Thus far, Carbon Fingerprint has been joined by over 30 brands and influencers, including several of the cast from ‘Made in Chelsea’, Olympian Aimee Fuller and choreographer, Kyle Hanagami, offsetting a combined audience of over 7 million people. The trees planted so far have the potential to absorb 5,000,000kg of carbon across their lifetimes which is the equivalent of charging more than 608,213,232 smartphones³. It’s our hope that we can build our community and with it, our impact in reducing the negative effects that our digital lives have on the planet.
Our Time To Act
In the coming years, it is our hope that Carbon Fingerprint will contribute toward an advanced understanding of internet-related emissions and that a refined algorithm (accessible to businesses and individuals alike) will promote standardisation in carbon measurements and make industry-wide comparisons possible.
Joining the Carbon Fingerprint movement is the first step toward making these goals a reality. A community of small voices will grow and strengthen until we eventually draw the attention of those responsible, placing an onus for this digital carbon problem on Big Tech companies! With new accounts signing up to the initiative every week, could you or your brand be next?
References
[1]: IPCC, 2021: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M. I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J. B. R. Matthews, T. K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. In Press.
https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/
[2]: https://www.carbonfingerprint.io/ | Last updated 2021
[3]: https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator | Last updated March 2021
[4]: Unknown (2021) Ranking of Instagram features according to their carbon emissions in France in 2020. Statista Research Department. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1177040/ carbon-emissions-instagram-feature-usage-grams-co2-equivalent-france/
