Not knowing a product’s carbon footprint is nothing unusual. I would say, the majority of people doesn’t know. Because we don’t learn it. To change this, Swedish oat drink manufacturer Oatly has successfully submitted a petition to the Petitions Committee of Germany demanding that all food sold in the German food retail trade should be labelled with the greenhouse gases (CO2e) emitted by their production . Among their supporters are brands such as fritz-kola, FRoSTA, mymuesli, Rügenwalder Mühle, Freche Freunde and Veganz (Source: Oatly).

Their idea behind the petition: Consumers have a right to information about the products they consume. And according to their latest press release on the petition, the food industry causes at least around 24 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. The choice of what we eat therefore has a crucial impact on the climate.

But how can we eat more sustainably if we don’t know how much carbon a certain product emits?

How can we become more climate conscious?

Climate Conscious. What does that actually mean? There is a certain expectation these days that technology will save the planet. Let me be very clear: it won‘t.

Wow, that from a climate-tech founder? How dare I say that?!

New technologies are being developed on a continuous basis. There are tools to clean the oceans from plastic or suck carbon out of the air. We, at Planetly, are building a software to calculate and analyze a company’s carbon footprint in order for them to manage and reduce it. Already existing products are being made carbon neutral, e.g. cars, refrigerators, energy in general.  

And while this is all very necessary and heading in the right direction – we should not just let technology solve the problem. Because it can’t. Not alone.  

Technology can simplify the battle against climate change. It can allow us to tackle problems easier and faster. It can help us restructure our businesses with new tools and processes. It cannot, however, solve the underlying challenge: human behavior and how we go about our planet. This requires a different approach.

Are we climate illiterate?

Believe it or not, nutritional information on food packaging has not always been standard practice. Nutritional labels such as a product’s calorie count only began to appear in 1994. This prompted an awareness of the health effects of food consumption and contributed to the trend towards health-conscious food. Now, you can find “bio” or healthy options in almost any grocery store.

As a result, when told a milk chocolate candy bar contains 400 calories most people can understand roughly what that means: how healthy or unhealthy that is. But If I told you that the same chocolate bar emits 210 Grams of CO2, most people would not understand how good or bad this is for the environment (Source: Umwelt Dialog).

And how could we? It’s not something we are being taught in school or specifically learn. If we don’t develop a specific interest, we may go through life not having a clue how that each and every one of our action contributes to climate change. Yes, a little bit - compared to what companies for example emit - but summing it all up, even a little bit becomes a lot if we add them all up.  

What will it take to become climate literate?

Strategies to mitigate climate change often center on clean technologies, such as electric vehicles and solar panels, while the mitigation potential of raising climate awareness is rarely discussed (Source: PLOS ONE).

There are two issues that I identified, which we need to overcome to develop a climate consciousness.

We do not know how much carbon we emit.

One of the main issues stopping us from fully addressing climate change is our lack of knowledge regarding how much carbon we emit. Over the last 115 years, emissions increased from 2 billion in 1900 to over 26 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2015 (Source: Our World in Data). This increase is which is contributing to global warming.

Though some people may be aware of the global carbon footprint, even fewer people know their individual or corporate carbon footprints.

In the United States, the average person emits 27 tons of CO2 per year: (Source: Penn State). In Germany per capita emissions are 9.44 tons of CO2 (Source: Worldometer). Human activities, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, have produced a 45% increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (Source: BGS). Various industries and activities contribute significantly to this percentage: Burning fossil fuels, farming, and forestry, agriculture, cement manufacture and so much more.

Would you have known this? I will be very honest with you: I did not know this before I decided to dedicate my work to fight climate change. So I completely understand that this know-how that I have accumulated over the past months is something that I have deliberately gained. It’s not something we learn “on the go”.

To be more climate-conscious we have to ask ourselves how we are contributing to climate change. Have you ever asked yourself what actions throughout your day contribute to accelerating climate change. If you have, you might yet face another challenge: Once you start dealing with climate change topics, you  might be asking yourself, how bad are these numbers? How can we contextualize this? This leads us to the second issue.

We do not know what these numbers mean and how much we are allowed to emit.

The second issue stopping us from becoming more climate conscious is that we don’t understand these numbers. How much CO2 do we emit? But what does that actually mean? How does it contribute to climate change? How much CO2 should we aim to reduce? Is it even possible to achieve the Paris Climate Agreement?

A comparison we often use at Planetly, to contextualize the previously mentioned numbers, is that to be in line with the 1.5°C target, a german citizen cannot emit more than 1 t of CO2 a year. As mentioned before, per capita emissions in Germany are more than 9 times higher than this suggested limit.

Another statistic we often use at Planetly is that 1 tonne of CO2 emitted anywhere in the world leads to a 3sqm melting of ice in the arctic. Again, you probably are thinking - 3sqm isn’t that much compared to the size of the arctic. Yet if consider the yearly emissions of a country, this number is quite astonishing.

In 2016 Germany emitted 775.752.190 tons of CO2. That is equivalent to melting 2.327,10 square kilometers of the arctic.

Let’s become climate-conscious. Together.

So, what does it mean to be climate-conscious? Much like what it means to be aware of calories and look after your health, we have to be aware of carbon emissions and look after our planet. Being climate-conscious means developing an awareness and understanding of emissions. We want to help create climate consciousness by developing an intuition.

So far at Planetly, we have been creating comparisons of foods, and activities and calculating their emissions to develop our intuition. And we are communicating these numbers on our Social Media channels for example. With the help of our experts.

For example, comparing carbon emissions of different types of milk. 1 liter of dairy milk creates 3 kg of CO2e. Oat milk creates 2 kg of CO2e and almond milk creates 1 kg of CO2e. Though almond milk appears to create the least amount of emissions the production of a single glass of almond milk requires 74 liters of water, oat milk requires less than 10 and dairy milk requires 120 liters of water.

Other comparisons we have done to raise climate consciousness are comparing various modes of transportation, vegan, and vegetarian meals, and much more.

All it takes to be climate-conscious is asking yourself these types of questions. How do my actions affect the planet? How much CO2 does this or that emit?

By analyzing our actions we can develop an awareness that can perpetuate itself into the corporate and political world.