To help you get to know your carbon footprint by playing. We want to help you develop a carbon intuition - so you can make quick everyday decisions based on each option’s environmental footprint.

You log your consumption in the app. Based on what you track, you’ll get items or animals for your island. You set a yearly carbon goal too. Your actions influence your virtual environment immediately - giving you feedback on how well you’re doing. If your progress towards your yearly limit is slow, your world will flourish. If you’re approaching the goal too fast & are in danger of overshooting, your island will be a very unhappy ecosystem!

They are the game’s token - you can collect them by keeping up your logging streak for as long as you can. You can spend them on inviting certain animals & plants to your island.

We need to ask you quite a few questions to get to know your lifestyle. We use this info to:

• Populate your island for the first time
• Calculate your yearly carbon footprint estimate with your current habits & help you identify areas where you can decrease your emissions
• Use this data to automatically calculate with, in case you forget to log for any date before the previous 5 days.

If you think about your last week, you’ll remember the specific things you did. If we were to ask you about your habits in general, it would skew your results a lot. We tend to be very bad at drawing a general picture of what we do, instead our answers are clouded by our aspirations. For these types of questions, how we would ideally want to behave comes to mind much quicker than how we actually behave. This is not a fault, just basic human psychology that we all share.

You can use the diet selector question to filter what foods we are asking about in more detail. We will only show you the food options that are relevant to your particular diet. You have the option to change your diet any time from your profile settings.

We are all humans & our memory often deceives us. Especially when it comes to remembering our habits. The further away an action is, the harder it is to remember. This is why we limit your logging window to just a few days - so you can log what you truly did & not what you wish you did.

If you log an activity, a corresponding character or object will be unlocked & placed in your virtual world. All of the items that are placed on your island so far, are collected here. By clicking on them, you’ll see at which particular consumption level you received them. It is not necessarily a good idea to keep upgrading polluting objects (like a car for example) - more consumption means a more polluted island.

These are the biodiversity items & are shown as locked, because we encourage you to collect these! The more blueprints & coloured biodiversity characters you have, the better. Biodiversity characters have 4 states: Locked - waiting to be collected Blueprint - you unlocked the character as a reward, but you need to spend shroomies so they move in to your island Coloured - they have moved in & are now thriving in your world! Dead - every whole tonne you reach in emissions (starting with 4 tonnes) means one animal or plant will become extinct. A small skeleton will show up on the island, but your album will still contain the blueprint. You have the power to restore biodiversity in your habitat, but it will cost more. It’s always harder to restore something than to protect it from harm in the first place.

It’s the place where you can see the amount you consume over time. The graphs can tell you which area you may be able to cut back in comfortably, where you can score the biggest reductions.

The greener your bar is, the better you’re on track to meet your yearly CO2 emissions goal. The redder it is, the faster you are approaching this goal. Don’t worry if it turns to red - by consuming a bit less, you can slow your march towards the goal & get back in the green zone.

Same as you would in the real world - by consuming less. The app calculates how fast you’re approaching your goal. If you slow down, it will recognise that you’ve cut back your emissions & your world will return to a healthy state.

Your consumption & carbon footprint impacts all life on the planet. Protecting biodiversity is an important pillar of the Climate Game project too. That’s why we use biodiversity as a game element - to help you learn how human consumption, environmental change & the life of these species are interconnected in this precariously balanced ecosystem.

By playing the game regularly - visit your island regularly to log your habits often. By performing these actions, we randomly award animals & plants. When you fill out our first questionnaire, you’ll unlock the polar bear. When you unlock an animal, you’ll get a blueprint for it. You can invite them to your island by using the game’s token, called Shroomies.

According to climate expert Mike Berners-Lee, every single person on the planet should emit no more than 3 tonnes of CO2 / year if we want to limit rising global temperatures to 1.5°. So every time you go a whole tonne over this limit, one of your species will perish. You have the option to restore biodiversity to your island, but this will cost you a bit more than when you first invited the species to your island. It’s always harder to restore something than to protect it from harm in the first place.

According to European dietary statistics, the average warm meal portion is 200g of meat, and according to Mike Berners-Lee the average European dairy portion is 300 g. We know that sometimes you may eat less & sometimes maybe more - we are ok with some estimation here. Over a long period of time, these fluctuations should even out. Meat consumption for non-warm meals differs so much from person-to-person, that we had to leave this out from the tracking for now until we can do more research to see if & how we can implement it later on.

Our main sources are climate expert Mike Berners-Lee’s revised edition of ‘How bad are the bananas?’ (2020), European Union statistics (EDGAR - The Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research, European Transport Safety Council, the UK’s BEIS & DEFRA - Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) Trusted carbon calculators from www.carbonfootprint.com, www.atmosfair.de, The Nature Conservancy. Tetrapak

We’ve tried to cover the most popular diet options in the initial questionnaire. If you don’t fit squarely into any of those, choose the one that is closest. If your diet changes for any reason, you have the option to change this in your profile settings. We only show you foods that are relevant to the diet you picked, so that you don’t have to skip logging foods every day that you don’t normally eat.

The same plant based foods can have very different footprints depending on where they are grown & how far they are transported. It is such a complex thing to track that we were not able to implement this precisely into the app yet. But we are working on it!

We found that showing an island was the best way to simulate your effect on the ecosystem from a graphic design perspective. We plan to introduce a feature where you can visit each others’ islands. If you & your friends are working on a land with the same shape, the comparison is easier for your brain to process as opposed to working with different shapes & environments.