The Climate Bonus: Demonstrating the climate feedback service

In the Climate Bonus project, a demonstrative GHG-monitoring, reporting, consumer feedback & reward system for households was developed by the research consortium. The created application enables consumers to follow up accumulated GHG-emissions of their household's purchases and to compare results with several reference levels and other users of the system. They can also acquire "bonus points" on the basis of a reduction of emission intensity. The demo version of the service covers foodstuffs, transport fuels and services, home energy and the "other consumption" category, and utilises multi-approach methodology - i.e. combines several data sources and approaches (LCA, I/O, ETS-data) to seek emission factors for a very wide range of product categories. Foodstuffs were registered automatically for the service through a Nutrion Code system (www.nutritioncode.com) that uses the PLUSSA-key card and the information systems of Kesko and Tuulia International Oy. The rest of a household's purchases can be entered manually via a computer interface directly to the Service or by using the optical barcode recognition capabilities of the Nokia mobile phone. Based on the pilot tests, the authors believe that the climate-feedback system could activate notable voluntary emission reduction potentials, provided that the feedback system is widely used.