Getting started with climate and environmental action can be a bit intimidating. But a good place to start is to begin tracking the impact of your daily actions on Earth and the future.
These apps can help you get started on your green journey by helping you be mindful of the type of food you consume, your travel, water consumption, and shopping habits. Here’s all you need to know.
Klima
Klima is a carbon footprint calculator and real-world impact app to help you find your impact on the earth while contributing to local and international environmental projects.
Klima starts you off nice and slow with a short, 5-minute survey, which helps determine your carbon footprint, with your country’s average carbon footprint as the benchmark. Your footprint is calculated using factors such as your meat consumption, house size, and number of annual flights. Once you get your score, the app introduces you to its real-life projects, ranging from afforestation and water conservation to home improvement initiatives in impoverished neighborhoods.
After reading through a project’s details and picking it as your first climate action contribution, you can start offsetting your carbon footprint by donating any amount of money to further its goals. Klima is also a good app for anyone in a corporate team looking to take climate action; you can directly connect the app with a Microsoft Teams subscription to undertake group donations.
What I like most about Klima is its collection of projects and their positive impact, and how informative the app’s breakdown of where your money goes is. For instance, Klima’s “Planting Biodiverse Forests” project, which was chosen by Klima for its Gold Standard certification, is a large-scale planting initiative that has created jobs in local communities of Panama and Darien, while helping 15 endangered species thrive in a flourishing environment.
Download Klima for iOS or Android.
Earth Hero
Earth Hero is a climate app that makes climate action fun: after calculating your carbon footprint and pollution, the app then offers a gamified action plan to help you undertake eco-friendly actions. The app helps you earn “Earth Points” by undertaking and checking off ranked climate actions (such as talking about climate action to another person, switching to LED lights, and vacationing close to home) from different categories.
You can track your progress by leveling up and collecting points (difficult actions fetch you more Earth Points), while tracking your individual emissions and watching them go down as you adopt new eco-friendly practices.
Beyond its sleek interface, what makes Earth Hero so fun to use is how the app makes climate change an engaging checklist. This is a perfect starting place for beginners. I like to create custom actions (such as using a low-watt light bulb) to personalize my steps towards climate action.
If you have been looking to join climate action groups and don’t know where to start, Earth Hero also offers an extensive catalogue of community climate groups you can join to elevate your efforts on a formal level.
Download Earth Hero for iOS or Android.
Tracky
Tracky is an app that serves a twofold purpose: it is a safety app that helps you track your family or other contacts’ location in real-time, while measuring your carbon footprint. Using its interactive map feature, Tracky allows you to track your close ones’ GPS locations. You even get notified when they reach an intended location, and for extra security, you can create a private family group.
Tracky has let me set up “safety zones,” which I use for frequently-visited places such as my family member’s office or the mall. What makes this location safety app a good addition to your folder of carbon tracking apps is its detailed insights into your and your family’s daily, weekly, and monthly carbon emissions, calculated through your everyday travel. This lets you accurately track your travel-related carbon footprint, instead of taking a shot in the dark during a carbon footprint survey.
If you are an iPhone user who doesn’t use Apple’s Family Sharing’s location-sharing feature, Tracky is a great external resource to ensure your close ones are safe and reach their intended destinations.
Download Tracky for iOS or Android.
Ecosia
Ecosia is a free green search engine that plants trees with every search you make. Your searches lead you to Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or Wikipedia pages, but the browser has a sleek interface with features you need for a decent web browser. You can use bookmarks, see your browsing history, create a reading list, and download content through Ecosia.
This web browser is also “carbon negative,” which means that solar plants, which produce renewable energy, are used to power the engine and your searches. Since the interface is so easy to use and connects with my Google search, I prefer to use the Ecosia app on my phone when I need to look up things I would on any normal browser.
With over 225 million trees already planted in 35 countries and 60 projects active, Ecosia channels all its profits earned through ads towards a better future. You can track the number of trees being planted and money contributed by Ecosia in real-time. For full disclosure, you can even access Ecosia’s monthly financial reports to see where your searches’ impact is being channelled towards.
Download Ecosia for iOS or Android.
MyEarth
MyEarth is an environmental impact app created by students and researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which helps you learn more about your carbon footprint through specific actions. Similar to Earth Hero, MyEarth gives you a list of eco-friendly actions you can add to your “Activities” tab. But what makes MyEarth different is how specific each action is: for instance, “Replace 2 servings of beef in your diet today,” or “Turn down your thermostat 13 degrees for 8 hours.” The app then tells you exactly how many pounds of carbon each action can save.
As someone with limited knowledge of climate action, MyEarth has been a handy tool to learn very specific and tangible actions that are relatively easy to do or make swaps that aren’t impossible. Although the app’s interface is not the most intuitive, MyEarth has been more informative about my carbon footprint than most online carbon impact calculators.
Once you add actions, MyEarth then allows you to track your progress through the weight of carbon saved and water conserved, and your overall carbon savings over time.
Download MyEarth for iOS or Android.
EcoHero
Community can be an integral part of managing your carbon footprint. EcoHero is a community-supported carbon tracking app where you can log your daily sustainability tasks. The app is a great tool if you’re looking to reduce your meat consumption: you can log if you had a vegan or vegetarian meal, and what you substituted it for. Each logged action calculates your carbon emissions, water or plastic conserved, and sometimes, how many trees were saved by your action.
With EcoHero, I track my meals, plastic usage, and lifestyle and level up my eco activities. There is a calendar view you can use to track your activities over time as well. You can view posts from fellow community members and interact with them to have a more close-knit, collaborative experience. EcoHero also allows you to participate in community challenges (like Vegan week or Sustainable Transport Week), and keep track of important environmental dates such as Earth Day.
Download EcoHero for iOS or Android.
Commons
Beyond food, travel, and water, an important aspect of tracking your carbon footprint is your shopping habits. You can use a monthly budget sheet to keep track of and reduce overconsumption, but another big step to take is to shop sustainably. This can involve a lot of research and time, which Commons cuts down with its app.
Commons is a sustainable app that helps you filter out greenwashing by finding sustainable clothing brands, rated by experts. For each brand and category you search, Commons gives a sustainability score, calculated based on factors such as materials used, slow consumption, and accountability. It also gives a detailed breakdown of what the brand is doing towards a greener future.
You can visit the brand’s website from Commons, bookmark a brand to visit later, and connect your card to sync your spending on sustainable clothing. Even if you’re uncomfortable connecting your card, you can use Commons to discover green brands. The interface for the app is extremely intuitive and sleek, and I enjoy using the app’s wide range of categories: beyond clothes, you can also find brands selling sustainable shoes, health and beauty products, and bedding.
Beyond sustainability, Commons is also a great resource to find local clothing brands you might have never come across. It has helped me expand my collection of new brands while cutting down on spending money on fast fashion.
Download Commons for iOS or Android.
The Carbon Games
The Carbon Games is a carpooling app to help you reduce your travel-related carbon emissions. This is a sustainable way to commute with your trusted circle of friends and colleagues. With The Carbon Games, you can book rides with your contacts who use the app and split the costs, all in one place. While the app is best used through corporate integration for a seamless carpooling experience with colleagues, you can also use it just to carpool with friends.
Trips can be planned and scheduled, and once your trip is complete, you can earn in-app rewards while tracking your carbon emissions and footprint. The reason the app has been a go-to for my carpooling needs is that, unlike traditional carpooling options, which often match you with a stranger, you can carpool with trusted contacts while
The Carbon Games can even work well in combination with an app like Tracky to be wary of your travel-related carbon impact and reduce unnecessary carbon emissions.
Download The Carbon Games for iOS or Android.
There are many online carbon tracking and footprint calculators that you can use to monitor your emissions and impact on Earth. The first step in using these resources is to plan what eco-friendly actions you want to get started on and what aspects you prioritize.
