Visualizing CO2: Making Emissions Tangible to Change Behavior

Despite increased awareness about carbon emissions and the ability to quantify it, there is still a gap between pledges of a low-carbon lifestyle and true behavioral change.

The reason, say carbon consultants, psychologists and policy analysts, is that carbon emissions aren't tangible. People can’t see the CO2 emissions from their cars and homes and airplane travel, and most can’t visualize their impact.

Companies and ecopreneurs alike are now testing strategies to change that, from introducing personal carbon budgets to making carbon into relational metrics like calorie counts and spatial objects.

National governments have handled carbon tangibility to some extent through tariffs and taxes. There is also episodic evidence of effective behavioral change when energy companies provide real-time feedback, such as sending electric bills that compare neighbor to neighbor in energy use. According to an American Psychological Association study, this can lead to energy savings of 5-12% for six months or more.

“This kind of information is believed to be more effective because it is specific to the individual’s situation and is conducive for learning how to achieve the savings,” the APA says.

A separate study about changing transportation behaviors by the Department for Transport (UK), however, found that the participants' stated intentions to change were not reflected in actual behavior.

It will be challenging to close that attitude-behavior gap, the APA warns, because “many of the most GHG-intensive consumer behaviors ... may be strongly affected by contextual factors.”

Putting CO2 in Context

Carbon Sense, a sustainability consulting firm based in the UK, is attempting to contextualize carbon by creating spatial relationships between the volume of carbon and familiar objects.

“We’re saying ... to people, there’s this huge problem. ... We’re used to giving this as the metric, which might make sense to engineers or scientists, but it doesn’t actually make sense to many people at a deep level," explains Antony Turner, one of the founders of Carbon Sense.

To put the numbers into context, Turner takes, for example, the amount of CO2 that comes out of car exhaust every 6 km and shapes it into a balloon with a 1 meter diameter, like the balloon the girl is holding in the photo above.

“People say ‘Ah, ha!’” he said. “It tips it into the space of our mind that says this is real rather than the space in our mind that says, ‘look at tomorrow.’ “

Based on different metrics, say the amount of CO2 emitted by a government building or a school, Carbon Sense creates graphic volumes and then places those next to familiar cultural monuments, such as Westminster. The illustration at right, for example, shows London's daily CO2 emissions in relation to its landmarks.

Turner’s newest spatial conception is the Carbon Quilt. Every day, according to Turner and his colleague Adam Niemen, a physicist, humans “gift-wrap” the planet in enough CO2 that it could form a layer roughly equivalent to the thickness of a piece of paper, 86.9 microns. Over one year, that’s 31 millimeters (roughly, 1 inch) thick — visualize a quilt covering the planet, growing thicker each year and trapping more heat, they say.

The tool at carbonquilt.org allows people to see a physical layer of CO2 emitted by a country, city, energy source, over a period of time placed over a map of a geographic area.