Climate Action App

[aspencage]

What problem are we trying to solve?

Climate change by eliminating carbon pollution.

Specifically, by empowering institutions and individuals to take high-impact climate actions and to share this information to build a movement of optimism and political support.

Right now, cutting emissions to become climate-positive is a clunky and expensive process. What actions can most individuals or institutions take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly, given their circumstances and resource constraints?

This native mobile app will provide users with tailored actions, quantified both in terms of carbon savings and cost (or long-term cost savings). This app will then: link users to simple resources (e.g., step-by-step guidance, service providers) to conduct these actions, allow users to balance their emissions by crowdfunding for climate action (self-imposed “carbon tax”), and share their efforts with their network and legislators.

Climate change will require economy-wide policy overhaul. But even with a 2020 Democratic electoral victory, the implementation of policy fixes is several years out – and initially will largely induce institutions and individuals to make changes they can already begin. An intelligently-designed app will accelerate climate action now.

Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from this project?

Directly: Institutions and individuals who are concerned about their carbon emissions, want to do the right thing in the absence of commensurate policy, and are unsure which actions can really have an impact.

Indirectly: Victims of climate change (today’s youth, future generations, marginalized communities worldwide, all 7.5 billion of Earth’s human population to some degree, global flora and fauna).

Where can we find any research/data available/articles?

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC 1.5 Special Report: Finds even greater impacts from small increase in global average temperature than expected, determines we have 11 years to cut emissions by half to maintain a stable climate system: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/summary-for-policy-makers/

Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, Climate change in the American mind: Finds strong support for citizen action, as well as institutional action; report also shows increasing concern around climate change and understanding that climate change is human-caused: https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/politics-global-warming-december-2018/6/

What help is needed at this time?

Looking for coders to join the team. Much of the app’s Phase 1 functionality will be focused on extracting information from lookup tables/databases created by us technical people (the “carbon nerds”).

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

Concept and mock-up wireframe design are in process. Coding and database-building needs are forthcoming steps.

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Project management

Checklist for NEW ideas 👶

Hey, you're official! You're now part of the growing Progressive HackNight community. Here's a few things to get started (a couple you've probably already done).

• Create this idea issue
• Flesh out the who, where, and what questions above
• Join our Slack
• Join the #project-leads channel.
• Ping an organizer to get started (The organizer in charge of onboarding new projects will be listed in the channel topic)

Checklist for ACTIVE projects 🔥

Let's get this project started! When this idea starts taking off, the Progressive HackNight Team will start helping this project's lead(s) out with project management and connecting you to resources you may need. To get there, please complete and check off the following:

• Update your project at least once a month. This can be either an update on this issue, a ping in the project-ideas channel, rsvp-ing to hacknight, or a conversation with one of the organizers managing project progress (the one listed in the channel topic).
  • It's ok even if your update is just "nothing new happened this month" or "we saw a small increase in traffic to our app this month". If nobody hears from you at all in more than one month, we may mark it as abandoned so that others can pick up this idea and run with it.
• Create a GitHub repository and Slack channel for work.
• Create issues to describe each task that you plan to do or need help with and how a contributor can get started on that task. You might start and stop a lot, so consider issues as your to-do list.
• Create a team for your core contributors
  • This will make it easier for you to manage your github repo access. People on a team have the same level of access. Admin access will allow your trusted contributors to make changes as needed.
  • You can remove and add people to your team as needed.
  • Note: You can also allow collaborators outside of your team and give them more limited access.
• Create a Google Drive, Dropbox, or other cloud storage to share larger files
  • Github and Data.World are good for code and data, respectively, especially when you need version control. But they're not good for very large files, documentation, articles, etc. A cloud storage option will allow you to easily share, create, and collaborate on documents with your team and help organize ideas and thoughts.
  • Doing this early on can help your team stay organized and to onboard new contributors who wouldn't have access to files you all have shared over email.

If you get stuck at any point, feel free to reach out to the leadership team in the slack channel or with an email to organizers@progressivehacknight.org or come find an organizer at a HackNight. We're here to help bring great ideas to life!