Sustainable Views: Can a green app change your behaviour?

Addressing climate change requires fundamentally changing behaviour. Companies' behaviour, that of governments, policymakers, and the behaviour of each of us in the way in which we choose to move around, to shop, what we eat and wear. If you feel like you'd like a bit of help in changing your habits to make them more sustainable, there is an app that can nudge you in the right direction. That's what A World's founder Alessandro Pinlotta told me about his creation. But to work properly, the app needs a lot of information about you so that messages and prompts can be tailored to each individual user. And this opens up some other considerations, not least the risk of being exposed to greenwashing. As Alessandro admits, A World is perfect for greenwashers, particularly because it has been selected as the official app of a United Nations campaign and it now has over 1 million users across the world. Not an Irrelevant Presence. I spoke to Alessandro, who incidentally is also a fellow Italian, earlier in January at an event running alongside the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos. We talked about habits, voting, and the risks and rewards of artificial intelligence. I'm Silvia Pavoni, your host. This is Sustainable Views, the podcast. So, AWorld collects information about users and prompts them to tweak their behaviour based on their stated values. What they care about, like for example preserving nature. In turn, it offers rewards for good behaviour. It gamifies users' sustainability efforts, as Alessandro says. The outcome could be hugely beneficial. The collection of personal data and the influence the app could exert, however, open up a series of potential risks. The UN campaign which A World is part of, Act Now, promotes the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, and any company's association with the app could be misused to signal virtue rather than commit to change. A World has also attracted other recognitions and partnerships. Before hearing from Alessandra, I should also mention that the conference we both joined in Davos was organized by a Swedish tech company, Doconomy, and FT Specialist, the division that houses Sustainable Views, here at the Financial Times Group, was the media partner of the conference. Now here's Alessandro explaining the idea behind 8World.

There is urgency in making people part of this journey. We know that we're living in a climate crisis. We cannot just wait for our government, our mayor, or our corporates to take action. We need the people to take action too. And the truth is people want to take action, but they don't know where to start. There's like an internal need that says, I need to do something, it's my planet. And that's the biggest part. People fail to see the impact of their daily actions.

So Alessandro says that people fail to see the impact of their daily actions. And he does have a point. Even if we as individuals choose to travel by train rather than car, for example, or carefully recycle at home, climate change is far from contained. In fact, 2023 was the hottest year on record according to the EU Climate Change Monitoring Service. Copenhagen. But is this lack of perceived impact due to the fact that people's individual actions just can't be meaningful enough unless the economic and policy systems around them change? Is the concept of community, developing a global community of like-minded people that Alessandro talks about, going to make a difference? The idea behind A World did come, as he says, from a personal experience. Alessandro's own experience being part of an industry, the fashion industry, that is one of the largest contributors to environmental damage, as well as being at the center of a catalog of other sustainability concerns.

Uh, I ended up working for the luxury industry, uh, sector, but then my final role was in a fast fashion company. I moved to Asia. I saw one of the factories that was manufacturing fast fashion. I saw the impact that the industry had on people and planet. I said, can't do, can't be part of this anymore. There's one saying that who's in fashion knows, if you're looking to understand what your competitor is working on, like the styles or the colors, You try to do some corporate skirmish. And I was walking one of these factories and I asked the lady that was guiding me through the factory and I said, come on, you could tell me who's my competitor, what they're working on. And they said, if you want to know the color, if you want to know the next color in season, you go and look at the color of the river. This means that, well, the chemical will be dumped in that with no treatment. That was the day that we decided to leave this world behind and to work on something that could use technology, actually use gamification. We were hired to build gamified platform to sell more products. We're actually using the same technology and the same sources to sell sustainability. That means empowering people, educating, and engaging. Fast forward 3 years after we launched this platform, which is called A World, which supports the official Act Now campaign, the campaign for individual action on climate change and sustainability. So you can find us on the UN's homepage. We've just signed an amazing partnership with the European Commission to support the European Climate Pact. And recently in December, we've just been nominated App of the Year by Google, Best App for Good. So alongside with ChatGPT and Spotify, A World is the best app in the world for, for good.

So how does the A World app actually work? How does it measure impact?

So the idea is to show people the impact of their individual actions. It works on three pillars. The measurement part, we need to measure our impact. This means carbon footprint, but also the savings that I can have by taking individual actions. The second part is education. I need to be more aware. I need, we need to create culture. I tell you why it is important and why this is so urgent. And then there is the engagement part. After telling you why these topics are important, I need to guide you with your hand step by step into taking individual action. Now we have the power of AI, of course. So in order to create more personalized journeys because your lifestyle is going to be different than mine. So we need to leverage technology in order to create journeys for individuals where you can relate to, where AWO is your companion that sits in your pocket and based on how you behave on a daily basis will, will nudge you into taking more sustainable actions, which means actions that help you reduce your carbon footprint. But why not also have a social impact too?

Right, a social impact. That's arguably the hardest impact to measure. Alessandro says that by working on culture, even before app users go to, say, a shop to buy a pair of trainers, they will have enough information and reference points to make a decision that is as good as it can be for the planet and for the people behind that product. Users, says Alessandro, will have enough information to guide their decisions about the people who should be put in charge of shaping the conditions under which those products are made. And that is politicians.

While creating culture, you should know already what products that you should buy based on the knowledge that we, we gave you. So the actions that we suggest are 150 actions which, which have been validated by UNFCCC, which you can do at home, at work, mobility, food, transportation, energy, looking at the carbon footprint too. So of course, the 4 categories of the carbon footprint, those are all actions that Heywood will also prompt to you. Energy purchases, mobility, and consumption. Those are the 4 categories of the carbon footprint. But we have much broader actions also tapping into voting, for example, actions that you could do with your peers. We tend to always think about sustainability as climate and environmental, but there's much more. So we're trying to be that broader platform that helps you live sustainably, which is not only reducing your carbon footprint but behaving, um, living with other people.

Alessandro mentions the UNFCCC, which is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Alessandro also mentions the app's ability to potentially influence voting. How does that work in practice?

If you download Airo today, Airo sits in your pocket and it tells you the equivalent of your carbon footprint while you're moving around. So the app is in your phone, it matches, uh, maps, GPS, accelerometer and gyroscope and it's telling you, okay, you've used a car to come here, that equals to X amount of CO2. You use a plane, you use a train, that's part of the measurement part. What is it? What it's gonna do is then it's gonna start to understand your living, how you live around. So how you're moving around, you're at home, you're at work, and start to nudge you into taking public transportation or less impactful mobility systems. In the future, we're rolling out a marketplace where you get rewarded with points by measuring your carbon footprint and taking action, which is different action than you previously had. You might be doing, uh, you're commuting with, uh, with your car, for example, and now you're gonna get rewarded if you avoid taking the car, if you avoid that CO2 emission. The energy we plug in with, uh, energy providers, so you can already connect Able to your electricity bill. For example, or the company provider could use A World embedded into their own platforms. And based on your, your, uh, energy consumption, it will, it will learn about you, starts to understand who you are, profiles you, and then it starts to nudge you in taking, reducing your impact and reducing consumption of energy, for example. And it gives you a list of actions that you could do at home and at work. That's how we're using it. On the purchases, on the purchasing side, the plan is to introduce Tokonomy into A World. We work on already many partnerships, but giving you an understanding of your purchases as, you know, Bidconomy is a specialist on this, to then understand who you are and then starting to post-purchase, starting to engage in you and tell you, okay, next time try this, try that. We want to be your sustainability companion that you will need to sit in your pocket and, and help you take these decisions. But on the business model is also they will be integrated into banks, into energy providers, into retailers, in order to work on third-party platforms too. So the bank can use A World with Tokenomi inside the bank's app without having A World as an external platform.

Hearing this, some of you may start thinking about the greenwashing risks I mentioned earlier, how companies' association with the app, one that is backed by the UN, could lead to its misuse. I asked Alessandro about this.

So the business model is, well, we mostly engage consumers and employees. We're very aware about greenwashing and scared about becoming a greenwashing tool. AWOL is a perfect tool for greenwashing because it's powered by the UN, it's consumer-facing. The good thing is that is it measures data. So with your employee engagement campaigns, for example, it tracks employees' activity, how much employees read and learn about these topics. The actions that they take and the carbon footprint they reduce. All that data is shared by, shared with the organization. So the organization is only allowed to communicate the partnership, always wanting to communicate the partnership with A-World because of the partners that we have, European Commission and, and the UN, but also the data that, that we generated. The fear of greenwashing is communicating a partnership and then not taking any action. We work really closely with their communication team and not allowing to communicate if there's not data that backs the activity. If you're a company of 1,000 people and you say you did 10 actions in a month, that will work actually against you. So that's how we stay away from greenwashing.

Now finally, Alessandro gets to how the app could influence voting.

We, we started with, uh, environmental actions that were easier to measure. I mean, taking a shorter shower, we can measure this, the, the savings that we have in water, for example. With the UN Act now moved from just environmental to environmental and social, that's where we added a lot of more actions that you can take, which are very difficult to measure, which are related to speaking up and voting, speaking up against racism and voting, for example, is one of the actions that we advocate our people to take. Though you'll be amazed, but there's a big majority of the population, also younger population that are not voting right now. In Italy, we had a huge problem over the last years. What we're confident in is that if we are able to translate sustainability to you and make it easy for you to understand, if we curate culture, you become sensitive to these topics and we make you care. You'll then, you'll then be voting someone, a party that, which is more aligned with your values. So we are, we were working on this translating knowledge into action. And voting is one of the biggest actions that you can have because we know that small actions could have a big impact, but also voting is something out there that could change the course of entire decades ahead of us.

There is another issue we should consider: how the data that app users share is handled, as well as its analysis through artificial intelligence.

Of course, since we work with the European Commission, we have to be extremely, extremely careful about how we use data. At the end of the day, we have tons of data about individuals. We know who you are, where you live, what your behaviors are, what do you eat, what kind of energy do you have, do you have an EV or not? And we also know, are you moving around? Where are you going? We treat that data, we never share that data, first of all, and the user is always in control of data. They can deactivate all of these features that continue tracking or delete their data. Instantly. Never share this data with third party. We use it only for internal research. I, I agree it's scary. It's a little Black Mirror to have a lot of this data, but it allows us to create a more, more personalized journey for individuals. And it's easier for people to relate to a journey which is tailor-made for you. If we want to succeed, if you want to have people engaged, I need to give you actions which are tailor-made to your, to your lifestyle. You might not have a car. I might have a car. I cannot tell you to don't drive if you don't have a car, for example. I need to be very specific in what I need to take. Otherwise, we are overwhelmed with tons of messages, tons of apps and platforms, and you get distracted right away. We know that changing behavior is extremely difficult. The more data we have, the more precise we are. And that, that's how we're using AI and machine learning right now is trying to understand and create journeys exactly for you. Because eventually you will change behavior. Changing behavior through an app is very, very difficult. It's only part of the equation, but it is the first part, is the awareness part, is the nudging. We believe that, so we're working on different motivations and levers that are helping you change behavior. We've analyzed a lot of users' feedback. We know that people want to, for example, monitor themselves and feel better if they're taking, if they're reducing the carbon footprint, for example, if they're taking action themselves. People want to be part of a community. So that's another big motivation. I want to see people take action because I want to, might want to mirror and copy behavior. But I also want to be part of a community of people that are like-minded, just like myself, which take action together. And then unfortunately, we always go back to the reward. For a lot of people, the reward is what really motivates it. What's in it for me? Feeling better just because I took action. Is a part, but we, again, we're easily distracted. Easily distracted changing behavior. We are habitual creatures. If you think about it, when you go to the gym, you try to always use the same closet. You go to school when you're a kid, you try to use the same desk every time, which is how we're wired. We go back to the same, we go back to the same thing. It's just easier. So we're really fighting that. And when fighting the intention behavior, That's our biggest beast right now. That is, I know that there's a crisis, I actually care, but I don't do it and I'll follow through. Why? Again, changing behavior is extremely, extremely, extremely difficult.

Changing our behavior is essential to containing climate change and creating a more sustainable global economic system. But the tools to encourage such change can be problematic. The application of technology in this area is fascinating. The results it could lead to, irresistible. Though the right safeguards, as Alessandro noted, must be put in place. This is an area at the intersection of technology and sustainability that the team at Sustainable Views will continue to monitor. I shall be doing so too, but from afar. I am starting a new role here at the FT Group, and this is my last Sustainable Views podcast. Alex, Philippa, and the rest of the team will be hosting the next episodes. Thank you for listening, and do keep in touch.