Changing the way 8 million people measure, understand and reduce their carbon impact

At Cogo, we’re on a mission to empower hundreds of millions of people and businesses to measure, understand and reduce their carbon footprint. But changing behaviour is no mean feat.

First, we need to understand the barriers people face when taking climate action. And then, build impactful products that help people overcome these challenges. That is why we apply a multidisciplinary approach to building our solutions.

Our multidisciplinary team, consisting of behavioural scientists, product designers, user researchers and data scientists, conducts research to understand the barriers people face when trying to reduce their environmental impact. These insights then fuel our products and solutions.

Our researchers identified that one of the key barriers to climate action is carbon literacy. The majority of UK consumers understand the scale of the climate crisis and the need to lower their carbon footprint, but they find carbon emissions difficult to understand, and consequently, they lack the confidence to take climate action.

The new ‘climate actions’ feature introduced to the NatWest carbon tracker aims to close this value-action gap as it helps users make lifestyle changes which can be quantified, giving them an understanding of the difference they have made.

About climate actions

‘Climate actions’ are essentially activities that individuals can do to reduce their carbon footprint, such as, taking more public transport or swapping out beef for plant-based alternatives. We work closely with our partners to carefully select actions based on their reductive impact, accessibility, and credibility.

Climate actions that take consumer behaviour into account

The new feature moves from giving customers average carbon savings for actions taken to giving personalised carbon savings, based on an individual’s spending habits.

Savings are calculated for individual transactions, categories and periods, making it much easier for people to understand, relate to, and implement sustainable lifestyle changes.

Climate actions examples

Fashion

We use banking transactions to calculate fashion carbon footprints. For this climate action, it calculates how much lower the footprint would have been for the equivalent second-hand purchase.

Transport

Our model uses bank transactions to work out transport carbon footprints. We use an average amount of fuel purchased per pound spent at a petrol station to calculate emissions. Similarly, we know the average emissions per pound spent on public transport. We also know how much carbon each method of transport emits for travelling the same distance. Using this information, we can work out savings from using public transport instead of driving.

Food

We use your bank transactions to calculate food carbon footprints. Averages are used since we can’t see exactly what people ordered or bought at the supermarket. Most of the emissions come from producing the different types of food that make up a typical diet. We then adjust the maths to reflect swapping out meat with plant-based alternatives and work out the difference to find carbon savings.

Empowering individuals to take action

Equipping people with knowledge about their carbon footprint and potential carbon savings helps improve carbon literacy. Consequently, people are more likely to take positive steps to reduce their carbon footprint.

When thousands or millions of people reduce their impact, it makes a huge collective difference. Our partnership with NatWest has already helped over 334,000 customers better understand their carbon footprint, with easy-to-action behavioural changes.

We can’t wait to see how many carbon savings NatWest customers make with the new feature.  

‍If you want to help your customers take meaningful climate action, get in touch. We are the only fintech on the market to offer this innovative feature.