Climate Change is no longer a 2050 problem

It's a 2025 problem. Here's why...

Average annual greenhouse gas emissions have been the highest in the last decade.

To avoid catastrophic events, we have to cut our emissions in half by 2030.

Coal has to go.

Fossil fuels have to go.

We don’t have time till the mid of this century to solve this.

The time to take action is now.

A simplified version of what we need to do is this-

If you think you can’t do much, read point 5 again :)

If I can help you get started on this journey, do reach out.

For this edition, I have 3 apps that can help individuals participate in the climate change fight⬇️

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Too many problems…Food waste is an environmental and social disaster. When food is wasted, all the land, labour and water used to grow, transport and sell food gets wasted. The wasted food ends up in landfills, releasing greenhouse gases like methane and CO2. At the same time, 1 in 9 people on the planet is undernourished- which says a lot about food inequality.

I don’t want to make a grocery list…Sometimes I wish refrigerators had an electronic list on their doors that could tell us what’s inside (and what’s rotting). But till that comes, there’s another solution. Kitche is a food tracking app solving the food waste problem. It helps you to efficiently use the food in your house and reduce food wastage. Here’s how it works-

• When you buy groceries at a supermarket, you take a photo of the bill and upload it on the app.

• It processes the bills and creates a virtual pantry with all the items.

• It then suggests recipes so that you can efficiently use up all the items that you had purchased.

Here’s a great video explaining how the app works-

Please eat those veggies…It keeps a running list of all the items at your place, which helps you to shop better. It also alerts you 5 days after buying fruits and vegetables, so that you use them before they go bad. If you end up tossing something, you can log it into the app. If you’ve been tossing something frequently, the app alerts you the next time you buy that product.

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Primest delivery…A few weeks ago, we ordered an iron box. And instead of one, we got two. We were in no mood to fill in the return request, tape up the package, print a return slip and walk to Canada Post. So we just put it on the ‘Buy Nothing’ local group on Facebook. Within hours, someone from the neighbourhood came and picked it up. Faster than Amazon delivery, eh?

Anybody?… There are a lot of items that our neighbours are not using or consuming anymore. And they would love to give it away. But they don’t know how to do that? And that’s where Olio comes in. It started as a food-sharing app in 2015, where neighbours could share surplus food with each other. But since then it has evolved into different verticals-

• It allows local grocery stores and restaurants to list their surplus food.

• People can put up non-food items for borrowing or sharing.

• They even have a ‘made’ section where users can buy and sell local homemade food and handmade crafts.

Olio App

Huge impact…There’s also a ‘wanted’ section where consumers can put in specific products that they are looking for. The app has over five million users who have shared 25 million portions of food and 3 million non-food items, preventing all of them from ending up in the trash.

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Did you know?…Air pollution is at an all-time high. Transportation is one of the biggest contributors to the problem. But did you know that exhaust emissions are not the only emissions caused by transportation? There are other factors like wear on tires, brake pads and road surfaces. They account for non-exhaustive emissions. Even your EV has this.

Know your impact…Wear on tires and brakes produces fine particles, which depend on the type of journey, weather and driving style. The Geco Air app calculates emissions of fine particles associated with wear on tires and brakes and measures the environmental footprint of each driver’s journey. 

• It takes into account factors like mass, the center of gravity, size of the tires of the vehicle.

• It combines that with the journey information provided by the GPS system every second.

• And calculates the resulting emission and the “clean mobility score” for each journey.

The mobility score generated by Geco Air

How can you improve?… Based on these inputs, it provides users with an ideal driving style to adopt, compared with their usual driving, in real-time. As a result, it helps them reduce the emission of polluting particles (NOx, CO and particles) and CO2. These simple, practical and personalized tips can help you make a cleaner drive.

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🙋Trivia of the week

In 2021, eight teenagers and an 87-year-old nun convinced a court that the X government had a legal duty to children when assessing fossil fuel projects.

The decision was hailed as a world first, but it has been successfully challenged by the environment minister. The teenagers could still take the case to the Supreme Court.

Their case attempted to stop the expansion of the Vickery coal mine in the country which is estimated to add an extra 170 million tonnes of fossil fuel emissions to the atmosphere.

Not surprisingly, the country is the world's second-largest coal exporter and is experiencing floods in the eastern part.

Can you guess the country?

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📊Stat of the week

Leaving you with a photo of sunbathing Dash.

Thanks and see you next week😄