Calculating Individuals' Carbon Footprints Using Transaction Data
(2021) INTM01 20211Innovation Engineering
- Abstract
- Climate change poses major threats to both the planet and human welfare. As more than 60% of the global greenhouse gas emissions can be derived from household consumption, the unsustainability of our current consumption patterns is evident. In an attempt to mitigate climate change, carbon footprint calculators have been introduced aiming to raise awareness and directly illustrate the negative environmental impact of individuals’ consumption and lifestyle choices. As the traditional carbon footprint calculators, relying on manual user input, have often been found to face challenges such as creating engagement and facilitating continuous use, an alternative approach based on the user’s real-time financial transaction data has been... (More)
- Climate change poses major threats to both the planet and human welfare. As more than 60% of the global greenhouse gas emissions can be derived from household consumption, the unsustainability of our current consumption patterns is evident. In an attempt to mitigate climate change, carbon footprint calculators have been introduced aiming to raise awareness and directly illustrate the negative environmental impact of individuals’ consumption and lifestyle choices. As the traditional carbon footprint calculators, relying on manual user input, have often been found to face challenges such as creating engagement and facilitating continuous use, an alternative approach based on the user’s real-time financial transaction data has been introduced. The purpose of this thesis is to identify and evaluate usage barriers and concerns of such calculators, and from this explore potential improvements with the purpose to increase user adoption.
This paper presents an exploratory case study adopting a design thinking approach, largely based on a case study, gathering data from literature, end-user interviews, industry practitioners and related industries. Our results are twofold, firstly indicating that the most challenging barriers are related to the precision and comprehensiveness of the calculations, and secondly suggesting that a promising improvement could be to allow users to provide manual input. When attempting to increase consumers' willingness to use this type of calculator it was indicated that improving the consumers’ personal data was of higher importance than improving the underlying emission data. We see a great need for future research in the area, including further exploring our findings using a larger sample size, investigate overall motivation for use and more thoroughly investigating the feasibility and viability of the improvement suggestions. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9057610
- author
- Schurmann, Albin LU and Jonsson, Ella LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- INTM01 20211
- year
- 2021
- type
- H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
- subject
- keywords
- carbon footprint calculator, personal carbon footprint tracking, financial transaction data, eco-feedback technology, usage barriers
- language
- English
- id
- 9057610
- date added to LUP
- 2021-06-22 13:52:49
- date last changed
- 2021-06-22 13:52:49
@misc{9057610,
abstract = {{Climate change poses major threats to both the planet and human welfare. As more than 60% of the global greenhouse gas emissions can be derived from household consumption, the unsustainability of our current consumption patterns is evident. In an attempt to mitigate climate change, carbon footprint calculators have been introduced aiming to raise awareness and directly illustrate the negative environmental impact of individuals’ consumption and lifestyle choices. As the traditional carbon footprint calculators, relying on manual user input, have often been found to face challenges such as creating engagement and facilitating continuous use, an alternative approach based on the user’s real-time financial transaction data has been introduced. The purpose of this thesis is to identify and evaluate usage barriers and concerns of such calculators, and from this explore potential improvements with the purpose to increase user adoption.
This paper presents an exploratory case study adopting a design thinking approach, largely based on a case study, gathering data from literature, end-user interviews, industry practitioners and related industries. Our results are twofold, firstly indicating that the most challenging barriers are related to the precision and comprehensiveness of the calculations, and secondly suggesting that a promising improvement could be to allow users to provide manual input. When attempting to increase consumers' willingness to use this type of calculator it was indicated that improving the consumers’ personal data was of higher importance than improving the underlying emission data. We see a great need for future research in the area, including further exploring our findings using a larger sample size, investigate overall motivation for use and more thoroughly investigating the feasibility and viability of the improvement suggestions.}},
author = {{Schurmann, Albin and Jonsson, Ella}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Calculating Individuals' Carbon Footprints Using Transaction Data}},
year = {{2021}},
}