To reach “Net Zero” by 2050, we need some radical and disruptive interventions.

 

The Citizen Carbon Budget (CCB) idea is simple: every person has a carbon budget that they can spend each month. Every consumer decision that has a carbon footprint has an impact on their budget. For example, the carbon footprint of travel will be impacted by the mode of transport and distance travelled. The footprint of consumables such as food and clothes will be impacted by the type of product, origin, manufacturing processes, `food miles’ and so on.

The vision of the CCB involves autonomous system technologies at two different levels:

  • the automation of individuals’ carbon footprint from different digital sources via a ‘smart’ infrastructure in which personal computational agents collect data on individuals’ behalf. We explore views on this speculative infrastructure through Design Fiction, as building such an infrastructure would take years.

 

  • the actual prototype of the “Carbon Budget Wallet” (CBW) app will implement AI-driven personalised recommendations as incentives for people to reduce their carbon footprint.

 

Overall, the aim is to investigate the technical feasibility, regulatory concerns, trustworthiness, and connected public acceptability of such a system; part of which will be studied as a working prototype (the CBW app), while the other part will form a related Design Fiction (CCB).

The project will build on the CBW, an app designed and implemented by students at the University of Nottingham, which users use to report their carbon-consuming activities (travel, energy use and food consumption) and provides a comparison to users’ own history as well as anonymously to other users on the platform (see figure 1).

Although there are other existing applications on the market, our approach will present a vision that takes into consideration various data inputs and a holistic representation of carbon emissions.

Contact Us
Project Team

Meet Our Project Team

Justyna Lisinska

Research Fellow, The Policy Institue, King’s College London

Lead Contact
Joel Fischer

Joel Fischer

Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, University of Nottingham.

Lead Contact
Dr Victoria Young

Victoria Young

Research Assistant, Work, Interaction and Technology (WIT) Research Group, King’s Business School

Co-Investigator

A. Gisela Reyes Cruz

Research Assistant/Fellow, University of Nottingham.

Co-Investigator

Liz Dowthwaite

Senior Research Fellow, Horizon Institute of Digital Economy, University of Nottingham.

Co-Investigator

Peter Craigon

Research Fellow in Ethics Legislation and Engagement, Future Food Beacon of Excellence, University of Nottingham

Co-Investigator

Elnaz Shafipour

Research Fellow, University of Southampton

Co-Investigator

Anna-Maria Piskopani

Research Fellow in IT law, Horizon Institute of Digital Economy, University of Nottingham

Co-Investigator

Gopal Ramchurn

Professor of Artificial Intelligence, University of Southampton.

Director, TAS Hub

Co-Investigator

Sebastian Stein

Associate Professor, University of Southampton

Turing AI Acceleration Fellow

Co-Investigator

Yang Lu

Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, York St John University

Co-Investigator