The story behind Decarbonista
Photo credit: Joanna Lesniewska
Article editor: Heather Moore
It started as a way to keep me motivated in my transition to lower my own personal carbon footprint.
Without other people, the cause felt hopeless. By reducing emissions with others I find myself encouraged to keep growing a community of support and practice. Today, the Decarbonista team helps anyone with limited time to upskill their knowledge, understand their carbon footprint and develop a plan for lowering their everyday emissions. Furthermore, we empower you to make impactful personal reductions, build confidence about the future, gain back time and energy to enjoy your life more fully, and be the #climatesolution.
We’re in charge of this challenge.
Having been a dedicated recycler, eco-product user, and tree lover my whole life, I was astounded by my lack of understanding around what causes emissions and climate change. I was seeking the answer to a frustrating question, “Why are we not sustainable yet?” Once I managed to educate myself, I realised that if I was buried in a sea of information - as a super motivated person - others were probably getting lost, discouraged, or simply giving up after a few token actions.
So I made it my job to get to the bottom of how individuals contribute to climate change, find the insights and build a collaborative community who could make impactful CO2 reduction a measurable reality.
“If you don’t know where you stand, you don’t know how to improve. ”
Before I committed to reducing my personal carbon footprint, I had spent half my professional career learning the art of communication and provoking action, and the other half working at Google applying those skills. In both of these environments, a lot of my job was about trying to get people to embrace new ideas and change their behaviour, and I soon learned that convincing is the easy part, once you get people’s attention. It’s the changing behaviour which is exceptionally hard, no matter how willing or engaged people might be. It’s human nature to reconsider, lose hope, or just get distracted by everything else that demands our attention on a day-to-day basis. In the case of climate change, we know that changing behaviour is critical to our future survival, so what can be done? How can we make it easy for willing people to get up to speed, achieve some wins, follow a plan and make an authentic positive impact?
One answer is to actively support those currently generating the highest emissions: People like me. Educated, established, 35-60 year olds. My research shows that we are also the most distracted by life, work and family commitments, and often genuinely unaware of our own environmental impact. Emission-generating activities are intertwined with values, purchases, and our identities, and thus very hard to address. On top of this, many of my peers mistakenly think technology will “save us” or that governments are on track to solve climate change for us.
From this understanding, Decarbonista was born. Through coaching, networking, community, and workshops, decarbonistas actively tackle footprint fitness together, offering busy people who care about climate change an easy way to upskill their knowledge, understand their environmental impact and develop a behaviour change based plan for lowering their GHG emissions in line with their values. By following one’s plan and joining the journey, you build confidence about the future, gain time and energy to enjoy your life more fully, and lower your climate impact.
Decarbonista doesn’t blame or shame anyone. We’re here to nudge, not to judge. Collaboration, data-driven progress, and being compassionately accountable to each other is what will move us all forward. For example, if we reached 30,000 individuals just through our social connections alone, we’d influence around 12% of the population of the City of Zurich, which could be enough to tip social convention*. Since each day we are either the solution or the cause of climate change, reducing emissions takes frequent effort and support. And together we are all fully capable of changing the trajectory.
Many of you have already made large personal emissions reductions and I want to say from the bottom of my heart at the top of my lungs: THANK YOU and KEEP GOING! Without you, we’d be in even worse shape.
If you have experiences that you think could translate into clear action points for individuals, please reach out to us and share! And if you’re just starting to get your head around this and want to make a positive difference, join in! We have an open Facebook community, Instagram, and a Podcast. I run online Meetups to deep dive on topics or you can always host your own Workshop. Just Contact Us and we’ll get going together.
Together we can extend the timeline of a cooler climate so that all beings can continue to live on this earth. Let’s create positive impact together. Every tonne saved - as soon as possible - counts!
~with deep gratitude,
Renée LaPlante, Founder
*According to Experimental evidence for tipping points in social convention, published in Science 360 (edition 6393), a minority viewpoint of between 10-40% could be enough to overturn the majority viewpoint.