Jibungoto Planet is a carbon footprint app co-developed with the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES). It shows how your lifestyle affects the climate and lets you choose concrete decarbonization actions based on numbers.
What Is a Carbon Footprint
A carbon footprint is the total greenhouse gas emissions over the whole life cycle of a product or service, from sourcing raw materials through production and distribution to disposal and recycling, converted into CO2. It makes the CO2 we emit visible.
Household consumption accounts for about 60% of Japan's carbon footprint. Reaching net-zero emissions requires a sustainable, decarbonized lifestyle with a smaller impact on the climate.
What We Can Do About Climate Change
Extreme weather, rising sea levels and damage to ecosystems are drawing global attention, and Japan is also seeing large typhoons, torrential rain and days above 35°C. To reduce these serious impacts, it is important to keep the rise in global average temperature below 1.5°C.
Japan aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 46% from fiscal 2013 levels by fiscal 2030 and to reach net zero by 2050. The average person in Japan is said to emit about 7 tonnes a year through daily life, but meeting the target requires bringing this down to about 3 tonnes per person by 2030.
Visualizing Your Carbon Footprint
Jibungoto Planet asks up to 10 questions in each of four areas: housing, food, transport and consumer goods. Your answers show your annual carbon footprint, and the app lists reduction actions in order of how much CO2 each would save. Sharing your results and chosen actions with others turns them into a public commitment.
Features
Services that visualize personal carbon footprints already exist, mainly outside Japan, but none were tailored to Japanese lifestyles. Most are in English, with data and algorithms based on other countries. This platform uses data and algorithms grounded in quantitative evidence from Japan to propose effective actions.
An Algorithm Based on Japanese Data and Lifestyles
Users' answers about their daily lives are processed with an algorithm developed by NIES from Japanese data and lifestyle patterns to calculate each user's carbon footprint.
Concrete Actions, in Numbers
Each user's footprint is compared with the Japanese average, and the effect of specific actions is shown in kilograms. Users can share their choices on social media to declare a change in behavior.
Open Source for a New Ecosystem
The source code is published under the MIT License, which allows commercial use. Companies and public bodies can use it to build and publish customized tools that encourage decarbonized lifestyles.
- https://github.com/codeforjapan/JibungotoPlanet
- https://github.com/codeforjapan/JibungotoPlanet-backend
Built Through Civic Tech
Jibungoto Planet was developed mainly at Social Hack Day, the civic tech hack day run by Code for Japan. The project started in November 2021 and met about 10 times before its release in August 2022. Five engineers and, including designers and idea contributors, more than 20 people took part. Development continues as open source, so anyone can help build tools that support the shift to a decarbonized society.
Use in the First Three Months
In the three months after its release at the end of August 2022, the app was used more than 2,500 times, and about 45% of users answered all four areas and chose decarbonization actions. The number of users passed 1,000 in those three months.
Users were spread fairly evenly across age groups from teens to people in their 70s. On average each user spent more than four minutes in the app, including about one minute on the results page.
Supporting Decarbonized Lifestyles
As open source software, Jibungoto Planet can be used by anyone under its license. We aim to build an ecosystem for reducing carbon footprints by connecting it with other services. Companies could add carbon footprint information and action suggestions to smart meters, IoT appliances, household budgeting apps, games, location-based suggestions or health apps. Local governments could use it for environmental education, policymaking, and workshops such as citizens' assemblies on decarbonization.
Working With Us
If you are interested in workshops using Jibungoto Planet or customized versions for companies or local governments, please contact us through our contact form.
Joining the Development
Development continues, including new features and UX improvements. Join #proj-jibungoto-planet on the Code for Japan Slack. If you are not on our Slack yet, see the Community page.
Media coverage (in Japanese)
