Smiling Earth—Raising Awareness among Citizens for Behaviour Change to Reduce Carbon Footprint

Abstract

This paper describes Smiling Earth, a mobile app to increase citizens’ awareness about their own carbon footprint, by integrating energy and transport-related data. The main aim of our work is to explore the ways in which Information and Communication Technologies could help raise awareness and educate and motivate citizens about their actions and their consequences on the environment. Smiling Earth provides feedback to users by visualising data about their daily activities with the aim to motivate citizens to change their behaviour to reduce their CO2 emissions by adopting a healthier lifestyle. The value of the Smiling Earth for individuals, cities and communities is discussed. The feedback from an expert evaluation and how Smiling Earth could contribute to Positive Energy Districts are also discussed.

A Review of Internet of Things-Based Visualisation Platforms for Tracking Household Carbon Footprints

“…Monitoring user behaviour over an extended period provides insights into behavioural change patterns and factors influencing sustained environmental actions. (d) Awareness and Education: The findings from [139] emphasise raising awareness and educating individuals about their household CFs. Practitioners can use the insights from the research in [140] to develop educational materials and campaigns highlighting daily activities' environmental impacts and promoting sustainable choices.…”

Smart Cities and Positive Energy Districts: Urban Perspectives in 2020

“…This Editorial article provides a summary of the Special Issue of Energies, covering the published papers [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] which address several of the topics mentioned in the Introduction. Table 1 identifies the most relevant topics in each published paper.…”

“…Sobah Abbas Petersen and all. [5] describe Smiling Earth, a mobile app to increase citizens' awareness about their own carbon footprint, by integrating energy and transportrelated data. The article explores the ways in which ICT could help raise awareness and educate and motivate citizens about their actions and consequences on the environment.…”

“…This, therefore, supports the assumption that projects with no self-declared PED ambition may be further developed to achieve PED status according to the PED Reference Framework. A further operationalization of the PED Reference Framework [5], which is currently under development, aims at a common PED definition that includes local differences and diverse approaches.…”

“…Reflecting these developments new "categories of cities" have entered the policy discourse but what still stands is that Horizon 2020 invested 43% of its budget (EUR 19. 5 Moreover, as several international activities on sustainable urbanization are ongoing, the aims of this third special issue is to provide a clear reference framework about Horizon Europe Funding to boost transition to sustainable urban areas, which is highlighted by perspective paper [1] by Paola Clerici Maestosi guest editor of this special issue and Maria Beatrice Andreucci and Paolo Civiero as co-authors.…”