Doconomy Carbon Calculator

Ryan Fan: Welcome to The Sustainability Agenda, a podcast series focusing on the evolving complexities of the sustainability landscape. I’m your host, Ryan Fan. Please join me as we explore today’s most pressing issues with special guests that will give you some new perspectives and help you make sense of what really matters.

Katarina Wangler Björk: I see that there is a lot of opportunities for corporates that really want to be in the forefront, both in terms of branding, creating relationships with their customers and also creating premium products or premium services.

Ryan Fan: Today we welcome Katarina Wangler Björk, Applied Impact Partnership Manager at Doconomy, which is a provider of digital services. Prior to joining Doconomy in 2022, Katarina worked as an advisor for environmental services firm 2050 for two years, and before that she established and headed the Innovation, Sustainability and Design team at EA Nordics. On today’s episode, we will be discussing Doconomy’s carbon calculator, what it does, how it is changing consumer and corporate behaviours, and why it’s an important tool for climate action. Good afternoon, Katerina. Welcome and thank you for joining us on today’s episode of The Sustainability Agenda.

Katarina Wangler Björk: Good afternoon, Ryan. Pleased to be here.

Ryan Fan: Really glad to have you here. Let’s begin with an overview of Doconomy. What is your mission and why?

Katarina Wangler Björk: Well, Doconomy is about climate literacy, I would say. So bringing awareness and transparency on your personal climate footprint and how you can act to reduce your footprints, to provide you with a starting point to create a better tomorrow, if you will. But it’s also about inspiring others to take action and how you can contribute to the trajectories of the 2030 and 2050 targets. So it’s sort of democratizing climate action, making it accessible to anyone and making it as accessible, I would say, as the weather forecast or weather report. You understand it and then you take your umbrella or your sunscreen, but with climate action.

Ryan Fan: So that’s the mission. But why?

Katarina Wangler Björk: We want our kids to have a better tomorrow than the planet we live on today. And we think that we have a limited opportunity to help that happen. And that’s why we all need to contribute and we try to do this through our digital tools in Doconomy, and we try to inspire others by also creating partnerships and relationships, collaborating with others. We see that as both our responsibility because we can, but also a really good business opportunity.

Ryan Fan: That’s excellent. So one thing that you said that rang true to me is that you’re bringing awareness, but you’re bringing an ability to take action. And to me that’s quite powerful. So what actually is a carbon calculator and how does it work?

Katarina Wangler Björk: In its simplest form, it is a calculator that calculates the carbon emissions, the carbon footprint, but also the water footprint on the activities you do or make. It was set up, our first calculator was set up around the ability to enable every transaction to carry a carbon intensity score, making every transaction count. So providing you with both the monetary and the planetary impact of a purchase. So our first calculator was only around consumption and also it’s enabled to consumers or individuals, if you will, through their banking accounts or credit cards. So very easy to tie in the insight on carbon footprints of your purchases and consumption to something that you do every day. The second one we call lifestyle calculator that we developed together with the United Nations. It’s a bit wider. It’s both around how you consume, what you eat, what your dietary preferences are, if you’re vegan, or if you eat meat or whatever you might prefer to eat, but also how you live, what kind of energy source you use in your home, how large your apartment or house or whatever you live in, how you travel, how you commute to work, if you work, and also how you travelled during holidays, etcetera. So we try to capture your full lifestyle, provide you with your footprint from your lifestyle and connect it to some tips and tricks on how you could act upon that, maybe reduce through another dietary choice, but also how you can also choose another energy source, for example. It’s available globally and for free. I think about 152 countries and we have a lot of users already today. So the third calculator is called 2030 Calculator. It focuses on products for corporates. So for small and medium sized companies, they could score their product from production until point of sale and see what is the carbon footprint throughout the process and where are the hotspots where we could actually reduce our carbon footprint in production. So that is the three calculators that we offer today.

Ryan Fan: That’s interesting. And so how do you think that this will change consumers’ response to companies, products and services? You know, can companies benefit from this?

Katarina Wangler Björk: We can see that there is an increase in demand from consumers and we can see that it actually has increased even though we have a cost of living crisis at the moment people want to contribute to a more climate friendly consumption and that they want to both understand how to do that and what different paths they can take, but also how they can select a more climate friendly or more sustainable product or service. So we see that both at the demand side, but also that this is a huge opportunity for producing companies and also for enabling companies such as banks, for example, to actually guide individuals, because individuals are, I mean, they have different roles. Me as a consumer, me as a citizen, me as a mom, me as a leader in a company, me as an employee in a company. And we have different roles where we need to make decisions every day in order to have a more climate friendly or sustainable lifestyle, if you will. I see that there is a lot of opportunities for corporates that really want to be in the forefront, both in terms of branding, creating relationships with their customers and also creating premium products or premium services, because that’s where we have most of the spending patterns, the top 1% of the world’s population. So there’s a lot of business opportunity there.

Ryan Fan: I assume it all starts with awareness and that’s a lot of what Doconomy is focused on right now, it appears. That’s great. Let’s move over to the financial sector a little bit, as you know, we are a bank. The financial sector is increasingly being called on to act as a lever to accelerate climate action. So in what ways can Doconomy help the financial sector meet these ambitions?

Katarina Wangler Björk: Well, absolutely. We also see that banks have a crucial role in this transition. We see that banks are major enablers that could extend their role and act as a platform for climate action, both for individuals and corporates and gain business to that. And we think that our digital tools can help banks to educate them, as you said, to provide insights in an easy and actually fun way, actually to engage customers and consumers around both climate action, but also around financial well-being, handling both the climate crisis and the cost of living crisis, and to engage and change behaviour to more sustainable lifestyle. A couple of months ago, we, Doconomy acquired Dreams Technology, which is another impact tech company which is very much focused on behavioural economics. So we’re pretty excited about this actually to be able to bridge the unique intersection of behavioural economics and climate impacts, climate inclusion and financial inclusion, if you will. I think this will enable Doconomy to offer our existing banks and financial institution partners to extend our behaviour science driven product portfolio and will include modules that we haven’t had before, such as climate smart savings, debt management and investment, above the things that we already have, which is much about educating and engaging consumers in climate action and also in inspiring consumers to inspire each other and set to compete or between each other how much you could reduce if you do certain changes in your life. I think we have much to do now to help banks with, but I think we have a huge potential going forward that is very, very exciting in many ways and both in terms of how to educate, but also to actually change behaviours that could benefit the banks and the banks’ business as well.

Ryan Fan: We recently had a carbon reduction challenge internally within CIBC and the uptake was tremendous and there is a swelling of interest, right, to take action and not just to gain awareness but really to find ways to take action. And I could see strong partnerships between Doconomy and financial institutions, you know, really, truly having that impact. So what does the impact tech industry still need to grow innovation and sustainability and design? Any advice you can give them?

Katarina Wangler Björk: Even though we’ve been around a few years now, I think Doconomy has a lot to explore and we need a lot of peers to collaborate with. We need new companies coming up both in terms of impact tech and software and climate fintech, which is our category, but with other solutions and also please with competing solutions. We need to be many and to be really, really good because we have a huge challenge before us. But we also need companies that takes on the actual solutions. How can we mitigate emissions and how can we reduce and how can we find innovations that actually serves human needs within the planetary boundaries? So there’s a lot of innovation that will be needed and will be needed fast. We need to both scale and speed up a lot. We have only 72 months to go before we reach 2030, so we all need to just hands on deck and work together fast. I think if looking at advice, there’s a totally different world now than just a year ago. The cost of capital has increased a lot and also try to find as soon as possible a viable business model because you need to make it happen. You need to make business out of it, otherwise it won’t work. So it’s the ordinary thrive, test your idea, prototype, try to see and understand if it makes sense from a people perspective. If people like it, if your user and customers like it, if it actually makes sense from an impact and environmental or social perspective. And also if there is business in it, if there is actually someone who wants to pay something for it and also partner up with others. It’s much easier and it’s much more fun to work together. And we need different perspectives to solve these challenges.

Ryan Fan: Yeah, this is certainly an interesting dilemma where, in business, elsewhere, it’s about competition. Here it should be about cooperation. And we see it because we all have the same interest, right? It’s as much for the planet as it is for any monetary reason that we get involved in this. So, listen, Katarina, I want to thank you very much for taking the time to join us on the show today. And thank you for all that you do. I think Doconomy is going to have a real impact, and I want to thank the listeners for tuning in as well. please join us next time as we tackle some of sustainability’s biggest questions, providing different perspectives to help you move forward. I’m your host, Ryan Fan, and this is The Sustainability Agenda.

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