- Carbon tracking explained
- Decarbon's approach to carbon tracking
- 🌱 Tracking within budget
- ❗Tracking over budget
- Please don’t lose heart 💚
- Lower your impact!
- Is Decarbon accurate?
- Switching Units
- Related articles
Carbon tracking explained
Carbon tracking is the wonderful process of creating an inventory of your activities that have generated carbon emissions.
With Decarbon, your carbon is tracked based on your daily purchases and daily commuting. You can compare your tracked carbon to your carbon budget to see how you're doing (see So what is carbon budgeting? for more) and learn if you need to make some adjustments to your lifestyle.
Decarbon's approach to carbon tracking
Decarbon tracks your carbon by automatically importing, categorizing, and assigning carbon emission estimates to your daily purchases. This is particularly useful because you can see how your impact changes over time based on your spending habits.
You can view the emissions estimates for each individual purchase from the Track tab.
Tap on a specific purchase to make changes, like modifying it to be more accurate. You can also see the exact calculations Decarbon made to provide the emissions estimate, as well as the sources Decarbon uses.
In Decarbon’s Track tab you can see your total carbon over week, month, or year timeframes and compare it to the budget set in Your profile .
🌱 Tracking within budget
The charts in the Budget tab will be blue if you're tracking within budget for a given timeframe. If you find that you're consistently tracking lower than your budget, you can lower your carbon budget (very nice!).
❗Tracking over budget
The charts in the Budget tab will be red if you're tracking over budget for a timeframe. If you find that you're consistently tracking higher than your budget, you should take a look at your top impact categories (gas, flights, food, etc.) and dig into how you can adjust your purchasing to have a lower impact (ride your bike, eat less meat, etc.).
Please don’t lose heart 💚
We know it can be discouraging or even anxiety-inducing to be over budget. Please do not be ashamed or intimidated! Lowering our carbon footprint is a journey that takes time and care. Just being aware of your impact and trying different things is already so incredible and powerful.
Lower your impact!
Once you’ve setup automatic tracking and know how your impact compares to your budget, the crucial next step is to actually lower your impact. You can do it!
There’s two overarching ways to reduce your impact:
- Buy less. As obvious as it sounds, consuming less is the most effective way for you to reduce your impact. The actual ways you can buy less depend on what your top impact categories are and your specific circumstances. For example, to reduce your emissions from gas stations, you’ll have to think about where you’re driving to and what alternatives are available (biking, public transit, carpooling, etc).
- Modify your purchases. Some purchase categories like ones related to your diet can be modified to have a smaller footprint. For example, you can lower your impact from eating at restaurants by committing to eating vegan on certain days of the week. Over time, this smaller impact makes a difference.
Tap on a top impact category in the Budget tab to get more granular insights into your impact.
Once you have a sense of your current footprint, scroll through the Climate Action tab for a list of personalized tips on how to lower it and take broader action with your community.
Finally, if you’re unsure how to lower your footprint further, explore our r/decarbon reddit community for inspiration. You can ask other Decarbon users how they’ve tackled similar situations to you. Be sure to follow the community rules and guidelines!
Is Decarbon accurate?
Decarbon is not 100% accurate because every product and brand has its own carbon impact that’s constantly changing. Decarbon places your purchases in broader categories that are weighted by your lifestyle choices.
That said, we’re constantly adding new modifiers and conducting new research to make our estimates more accurate and personalized! As Decarbon’s data improves over time, your impact estimates also automatically get updated.
Switching Units
You can change the unit of measurement that Decarbon uses to display your carbon information to you from the unit switcher that’s available on virtually any screen on the app.
Access the unit switcher by tapping on the current unit on the top right of the screen in the app bar. You can then choose a new unit to switch to.
The current units available are:
- kg CO2e
- lbs CO2e
- miles driven
- trees planted (the number of trees that would need to be planted to offset your impact)
- phones charged
This equivalency data for different units is provided by the US EPA.
Related articles
Next: Commute Tracking
Home: 
Did we miss something? Not to worry! Just email us at hi@decarbonapp.com