USA–The city of San Francisco has launched an online mapping project called the Urban EcoMap, that tracks the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced by its neighbourhoods — and beyond that, what has produced them: transportation, energy use or waste. Basically, it is borrowing the concept of environmental contests run on college campuses to encourage students to be more eco-friendly — only on a metropolitan scale.
The core of the tool is its map, broken up by zipcode, which allows you to click to view emissions data for your particular region. One can separate out transportation, energy and waste to turn the map (provided by Google) into a heatmap showing which zipcodes produce the most emissions from these sources. The overall goal of the project is to call bad habits to residents’ attention — ambitiously lowering the city’s 1990 average for emissions by 20 percent, effectively making the city greener than even the Kyoto Protocol requires.
This is a pretty lofty goal for the website, which serves a very narrow audience. In addition to the mapping tool, it provides copious recommendations and goal-setting resources for reducing your carbon footprint. But the San Franciscans who bother to check the site regularly, much less use it to change their behaviours, are probably already aware of the issues and the actions that need to be taken. Not that there’s anything wrong with the preaching — the interface is clean and surprisingly informative — but the city needs to work on expanding its choir before an effort like the EcoMap will make a real difference.
