Carbon Engine Introduction

The Carbon Engine calculates carbon footprints and carbon savings for users' transactions based on the transaction categories, the spend amounts, and additional survey data entered by users.

Footprints

For each transaction, the Carbon Engine uses the transaction's category to look up an emissions factor. An emissions factor is the average amount of carbon dioxide equivalent in kilograms (kg CO2e) that is emitted for every unit of currency spent.

Multiplying the currency amount of the transaction by the emissions factor results in the carbon footprint for that transaction.

Because emissions factors change over time, as prices and carbon efficiency change, the Carbon Engine uses the date of the transaction to select the emissions factor. For this reason, two identical transactions a year apart may have different footprints.

Footprints are stored against the transaction. They are not recalculated, even if the emissions factors change, unless the user edits the transaction or tells us about a climate action they were doing in the past (e.g. not eating meat). This means once a user has seen the footprint for a transaction or for an entire month it will not change unexpectedly.

Carbon Savings

The Carbon Engine has a set of Quantified Climate Actions, which calculate carbon savings based on a user's transactions and their responses to survey questions.

Note: Quantified Climate Actions are not included in all licenses.

There are three types of carbon savings for each quantified climate action:

Realised savings are actual reductions of the carbon footprint the user accrued as a result of a climate action. They are an opportunity to recognise the user's sustainable behaviour. Realised savings apply to specific transactions or to a period and can be summed over time.

Unrealised savings are potential reductions of the carbon footprint the user could have accrued had they taken a specific action. They are an opportunity to encourage the user to take additional actions. Unrealised savings only apply to specific transactions.

Projected savings are an estimate of how much the user will save in the future if they adopt a climate action.

Note: The example actions given in following sections may be different from those that are available for your license.

Carbon Savings versus Carbon Footprints

Carbon footprints and carbon savings are closely related. As savings go up, footprints go down. For most climate actions, realised savings are already taken into account in the footprint. For example, turning your thermostat down results in a cheaper energy bill and therefore a lower carbon footprint; separately we can accrue realised savings if we know the user has taken this action.

For diet actions, the savings from eating a low-carbon diet are not automatically picked up in the spend data. For example, a meat-eater and a vegan may spend the same amount at a supermarket but the carbon footprints will be different. Therefore, once the user tells us they are eating a low-carbon diet, they see a reduced footprint for their food transactions as well as realised savings.

Activating Climate Actions

Some climate actions work without user input: we can see spend for public transport, second hand fashion and renewable electricity in the user's transactions and automatically calculate realised savings.

Other climate actions require users to submit question responses. For some actions, this is simply a case of telling us when they started doing the action (diet). For other actions, additional data is required. For example, if a user drives an EV we need to know how many miles a year they drive it.

Questions and response options are provided via the API. For more details on our climate actions, contact your Cogo representative for our product documentation.