Sustainable Shopping Assistant by Ursa
Pitch
The bot will track your environmental impact, offer suggestions for improvement, set goals, and provide rewards to users and communities.
Description
Summary
There are currently no tools for measuring our individual contributions to global climate change. We want to build a tool that will be able to measure the combined impact of producers and consumers in order to influence pattern/behavior changes in a collective manner to optimize for the health of their local environments.
Is this proposal for a practice or a project?
Project
What actions do you propose?
Who will take these actions?
Where will these actions be taken?
In addition, specify the country or countries where these actions will be taken.
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Impact/Benefits
What impact will these actions have on greenhouse gas emissions and/or adapting to climate change?
The simple solution is to reduce the amount of animal products we eat. We need to increase product transparency so consumers can make informed buying decisions rather than being left in the dark or confused by marketing. The simple solution to reducing our global impact on GHG emissions is switching to a vegetarian diet which can:
- reduce land use by 3.1 billion hextares
- reduce GHG emissions by 6.6 billion metric tons of CO2eq (49%)
- 50% accidification reduction
- 49% Eutropification reduction
- Scarcity-weighted freshwater withdrawal 19% reduction
- increase carbon sequestration of 8.1 billion metric tons of CO2eq each year
Here's why switching to a vegetarian lifestyle will have such a drastic effect:
Today's food supply chain is responsible for creating ~13.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivelent emissions (CO2eq) or about 26% of anthropmorphic green house gas emissions[1] according to aggregated research collected by J. Poore from the University of Oxford. Today's agriculture is not efficient. Producing just 5% of the worlds calories creates ~40% of the environmental burden - most of that is a result of the animal agribusiness. Global surface area allocation for food production accounts for 50% of all habitable land area[2]. Many products GHG impacts are skewed by inefficient, dirty producers. For example, for beef originating from cattle herds, the highest impact 25% of producers represent 56% of the cattle herd's GHG emissions and 61% of the land use (an estimated 1.3 billion metric tons of CO2eq and 950 million hectares of land, primarily pasture). Across all products, 25% of producers contribute on average 53% of each products environmental impact [2]. A major problem consumers face today is a complete lack in transparency and a blackout of data about the impacts their products have on the environment. 2 identical products (different brands/manufacturers) can have vastly different environmental impacts. So there is a massive gap in data collection which needs to be filled. A major Chinese study of 21 million farmers showed that those who measured their impact reduced emissions by over 20% and additionally saw a 20% yield increase. So not only does the act of measuring have a significant impact on emissions, it actually improves crop efficiency and increases yields.
If we can incentivize consumers to buy products which are measuring and actively trying to reduce their emissions, we can apply pressure on the dirty producers and force them to change or price them out of the market. The simplest and lowest cost solution actually starts with the consumer's diet.
1. Reducing Foods Environemtnal impacts through producers and consumers
2. Global Surface area allocation for food production
By:
Ursa
