The Lighter Footprint App
The Lighter Fooptrint App was inspired by two things: 1) Etho founder Anna Bohn’s own inability to conceptualise, plan, or budget her footprint 2) Vancouver’s 2020 Greenest City goals, which included a 33% percent reduction of individual footprints. The question of how cities (and individuals) might measure this started the process that lead to the App.
In 2019, Etho began working with Dr. Jennie Moore (Dean of Sustainability, BCIT) to create the Lighter Footprint App. Together with BCIT’s Cora Hallsworth and Ryan Mackie, Etho prototyped a tool to help BC residents understand and reduce their footprints. App users take a 10 minute lifestyle quiz to receive their localised carbon and ecological footprints. They then choose from a personalised selection of suggested climate actions, and track their progress over time.
Together with the team at BCIT, Anna has presented the project at the EcoCity Conference in Vancouver and (virtually) in Rotterdam. Last year’s topic was “How you can use gamification and behaviour change theory to inspire climate action.” The marketing materials for the conference include a custom vector illustration of Vancouver.
The Lighter Footprint App is part of a pilot program run by BCIT’s Centre for Ecocities, in which 10 BC municipalities did an ecocity footprint analysis to generate their city-wide footprint. This data was used in the App in order to output a highly-localised footprint for app users, specific to where they live.
