Imagine you and your friend comparing carbon footprints, evaluating the environmental impact of your spending. There’s an app designed for this purpose called Cogo. Cogo utilizes open banking to help individuals and businesses track their carbon footprint based on spending. Your friend mentions spending £83 at a gas station yesterday, equivalent to a carbon footprint of 296 kg, as indicated by the app. Is this considered high? Answering this question requires more context. While many are aware that flying has a high carbon emission rate, what if this 296 kg was from a train or bus?

Cogo was interested in investigating whether informing people about the carbon intensity of various products would enhance their carbon literacy – defined as someone’s environmental-related knowledge, confidence, and motivation. To address this, 995 participants were presented with online banking application screens showcasing different transactions, including cost and carbon intensity. The presentation of carbon intensity information varied among five treatment groups (see displays below).

After displaying these screens, we evaluated participants’ knowledge of the relative carbon intensities of different options, along with their confidence and motivation to reduce their carbon footprint. From these responses, we computed an overall carbon literacy score for each participant. Our hypothesis posited that the spectrum display would yield greater carbon literacy by enabling users to assess the carbon intensity of different products.

Our findings indicate that carbon literacy scores were significantly higher among participants in the Spectrum (t(990) = 2.3, p = .02) and Spectrum+ (t(990) = 2.1, p = .03) groups compared to the Control group (see below). In other words, compared to providing no information, presenting relative carbon intensities on a spectrum increased carbon literacy by up to 8%, or 4.2 percentage points (see graph below). These results suggest that presenting carbon intensity in a way that allows people to understand the relative impact of their purchasing decisions can effectively boost carbon literacy.

These results suggest that presenting carbon intensity in a way that enables people to understand the relative impact of their purchasing decisions can be an effective way of boosting people’s carbon literacy. As a result of this project, Cogo was the first to market carbon tracker applications to adopt the color-coded spectrum display in its app.