Who Are we?
We are currently a small group of interested people working in our spare time to make this project a reality.
Rafe Bertram is an Architect and is passionate about design that makes a difference to the world’s most pressing issues. He’s been involved in sustainability, innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration his whole career.
Always wanting to extend the reach of environmental issues beyond the built environment, he made a clunky personal carbon tracker in 2003 which was useful but not very successful. Since then, the pressure to create an evolution of this has grown and grown, and has tried in several ways to make this happen. He was very excited to join up with volunteers Anna Marie, Peter, Hal, Tiare, Gabi and Ashley. Together they realised that something big could happen… |
Bryan Ho is an Architecture student at the University of Cambridge. I am very interested in architecture's role in the wider urban realm and I believe that the basis of design should be grounded in research and relation to context.
For this reason, I believe there is much more scope for digital technology to enable the built environment to operate in a much more sustainable way, and this project is one step towards that. |
Hal Bertram
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Marion Grahek is a Class of 2019 graduate and founding class member at Minerva Schools at KGI, an innovative university working to redesign the structure of higher education by incorporating technology and the science of learning. Grahek received her Bachelor of Science in Natural Sciences: Earth Systems and took supplementary courses on Social Economy, the broad study of the intersection of the environment, politics, economics, and society. Her thesis focused on the role of organic agriculture in adapting to climate change, land degradation, and drought in India, taking her on a journey by plane, trains, and rickshaws through five states in India between February 2018-2019 (see more at Growth/https://spark.adobe.com/sp/design/page/731b75f5-11d5-43f4-a02c-5b90a4c836b9). Grahek is currently based in Los Angeles but met team member Rafe Bertram in London in Fall 2018 when they bonded over a passion to create systemic change for a more sustainable future through inspiring individual behavior change encouraged through well-designed nudges towards a carbon-neutral life system.
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Pen Stuart is a sustainability consultant who has worked with trends and future scenarios for a decade. Looking into the future for so long has brought home the need to act today, and he is excited to help people make more of a positive difference by seeing not just the doom and gloom, but being inspired by the role they can have in changing it.
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Tiare Ferguson has spent the majority of her career in strategic partnership development for multiparty co-innovation between and amongst startups and corporations. This includes licensing, channel partnerships, acquisition, joint development agreements, startup spinouts, and internal corporate innovation. She has been working to develop product-level carbon emissions solutions since the fall of 2015. Tiare holds a BA in Public Policy and MBA in sustainable management.
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Peter Land is an environmental scientist and Tai Chi teacher with a longstanding interest in eco-building (especially Passivhaus), impact reduction and carbon numeracy. When Anna Marie first asked me to help with her idea of a lifetime carbon budget to me in 2016 I leapt at the chance, and together we developed the Personal Carbon Tracker spreadsheet. There followed a few fallow years in development terms during which I used the PCT heavily to guide my life choices. Now it's taking off again thanks to Rafe, but the commitments that followed from those choices leave me with almost no time to help with the exciting new developments - how frustrating! For the moment I'm a highly-motivated onlooker.
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Anna Marie Byrne is a ventilation design engineer for a company specialising in Passive House design and a qualified Passive House Designer. Also a mum to two children.
"In November 2015, I wondered what the remaining carbon budget came to as a per person figure and whether we, as a family, were within that budget. Also, I wanted an app, or at least a spreadsheet, to work out how to best spend that budget. After a fair bit of googling I had not found anything on personal carbon budgets so this is the product of the research I did to find answers." |
Also involved (all voluntarily) are a Graphic designer, Web designer, Philosopher/Economist, Media Officer and anyone else who helpfully replies to our various questions about this.
Who else do we need?
We'd love to have a dedicated team of impartial, scientific trained, paid individuals or organisations who can put serious time and money into developing an easy to use, accurate and fun tool for individuals to plan their way off fossil fuels in a painless and possibly even exciting way.
So if you happen to be such an organisation and see the value in making this happen; PLEASE DO!
Or perhaps this idea and the relevant tools are already out there and we just haven't found them yet. If so, please let us know and we'll sit back and relax.
Otherwise, skills and expertise required are:
So if you happen to be such an organisation and see the value in making this happen; PLEASE DO!
Or perhaps this idea and the relevant tools are already out there and we just haven't found them yet. If so, please let us know and we'll sit back and relax.
Otherwise, skills and expertise required are:
- Technology numpties to test what we've made in the real world and tell us that it is or isn't legible
- Tech geeks to make it work
- Communications / Marketing people who know what turns Joe Bloggs on or off
- Joe Bloggs to get turned on or off and to tell us where we're going wrong
- People who can find money! Could be very useful
- Graphic designers / Artists
- Experts in any and all of the fields: Food, home energy, transport, stuff, societal emissions...
- Policy experts who can help us predict the future
- Famous and respected people to endorse and promote the idea
What needs doing?
We would like to see this idea developed and possibly the above scenario will happen. Great.
Otherwise, we would like advice, help, funding, partners... to develop the idea of personal carbon budgets. We want to create a tool / tools that enable people to understand what their budget is, where their budget is going, what changes are within their power to make and what changes will be required by larger society. Above all we want to make it FUN, EASY TO USE and ACCESSIBLE. |
Why join us?
At the moment governments are negotiating how to prevent catastrophic climate change. With debatable levels of success. But even if our governments were perfect and had a plan for reducing net emissions to zero within the time scales required to make our planet safe, they would fail without the help of individuals.
There are areas of emissions that most governments don't even mention for fear of being unpopular or irrelevant but which need dealing with if we are to stay within our global budget. Diet is one such issue, car and aeroplane use another. We are currently spending our remaining budget blindfolded. Most people, myself included, are unaware what causes a tonne of CO2. To make the transition off fossil fuels, we need to have easy access to the figures. And we need to be able to build that understanding into our day to day lives in the same way that we budget with money. |
Photos used under Creative Commons from JeepersMedia, alwright1