Institute For The Future

Watch Your Carbon Footprint As You Go

Participatory web service Dopplr, which allows individuals to coordinate travel and inform colleagues about where they'll be, has now introduced a tool for calculating the carbon footprint of your journeys.

 

Dopplr co-founder Matt Jones describes its purpose this way:

One of the aspects of creating social tools that fascinates me is the ability to make the invisible visible, and what effect surfacing these patterns then has on us as individuals and groups.

For a while there have been carbon calculators on airline websites and environmentalist websites, but generally they have been about directly showing the impact of an individual action, rather than the patterns and trends influencing the actions in the first place.

 

The tool, which uses data from AMEE, allows you to select mode of transportation, but is still fairly crude. It's an interesting start, though, and I'd expect to see similar mechanisms popping up in abundance.