Planet2100

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Inspiration

Climate change has multiple sobering consequences: increasing temperature, melting glaciers, frequent extreme weather events and creation of millions of climate refugees. However, the governments across the globe have been fairly incompetent in fighting this crisis effectively, there seems to have no consensus among the intellectuals and lobbying from oil and gas corporations been holding us back.

We think, in this situation, every single person need to take responsibility and only collective action can avert the looming climate disaster. For the common people, climate change seems to be more of an abstract problem and they seem very hard to be motivated to change their behavior. The complex graphs and long reports doesn't help either. So, how can we reach these people? We believe games have the capability of behavioural modifications, and we need it on a global scale at present. So, we propose a social game, Planet2100, to change the attitude of people with the competitions giving motivation and rewards driving engagement.

What it does

Our solution uses gaming elements within non-gaming sustainability context to influence real-world behaviour. Planet2100 take the features of games that keep players’ attention, like points, badges, leaderboards and challenges, and apply them to real-world situations that otherwise might seem mundane or boring to increase engagement. These gaming building blocks are used to engage users, solve problems and drive specific behaviours.

The algorithm that lies within the app converts the activities entered by the user to a score (Green Coins) calculated based on their contribution to saving the carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere. The current version uses the matrices of the City of Munich and Germany. Every activity on the app gives users Blue Gems, which will help them purchase badges or participate in exclusive challenges. The user is required to enter a photograph or share location data to validate the activity.

It is designed such that a user who achieves 2100 Green Coins in a year shall contribute to the carbon reductions per capita per year, required to limit global warming by the year 2100 to 1.5°C.

How we built it

The research was done for the underlying algorithm using various climate reports on Munich and Germany , including latest IPCC report as well as SWM energy and water consumption data.

We built the app using Java and the Android SDK.

Challenges we ran into

There are no universally accepted ways to calculate a person's carbon footprint and we had to limit our current scope to the most direct and simple activities. Also, we had the dilemma how to ensure the activities being reported by users are genuine.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to simplify the complex world of climate action into a simple, relatable and fun game which gives you coins and gems, equivalent to their carbon footprint savings.

We built a functional prototype of our app in one day all while figuring out the rules and concepts, even though, as team we are new to android app development .

What we learned

Developing an Android app in one day is hard. ;)

What's next for Planet2100

We'll need to finish the prototype and build a business model. In the long term, the app can be expanded to multiple cities across the globe, and even suburbs and rural areas to have as many people as possible on-board, because only if every single person on the planet, do their part, we can save ourselves.

There is also an opportunity to partner with various agencies like waste management companies, municipalities, utilities, etc. to have an anonymous verification of activities added by users through say QR codes. There could also be computer vision and machine learning capabilities to be integrated to verify images and build valuable insights that could influence global policy changes.