Climpact: Flying, Fondue and CO2

(Image: Pixabay CC0) Everything we do has a carbon footprint but are our perceptions of the emissions we generate on a daily basis aligned with reality? To find out, two researchers have launched Climpact a new tool to help separate fact from fiction. Whilst the environment, including our climate, came out as the main concern for Swiss people in 2022 , a global survey by the market research firm IPSOS has found that misconceptions are rife about the most effective climate solutions. In a bid to further understand how people perceive the efficacy of climate actions, two researchers Victor Kristof and Lucas Maystre, part of the lnformation and Network Dynamics Laboratory in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) have launched an interactive tool to measure and communicate how people view the impact of our daily choices. "We wanted to apply some of the statistical models that we were developing in our research to study how people perceive the carbon footprint of their actions, for example, how much do you think is emitted by drinking from a plastic water bottle? It's super difficult to answer, most people probably have no idea and what we've developed is a model that converts comparisons of the carbon footprint of different actions to an absolute scale. This enables us to compare perception to that of the true carbon footprint," explained Kristof. The data sets didn't exist In 2019, the pair started creating a data set of actions like flying, eating meat or heating our homes.