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 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.
Scroll down in the Budget tab to see your tracked purchases
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.
<aside> đź’ˇ Learn more about Decarbon's open-source emissions database at Why open-source?
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Tap on a purchase to see the CO2e calculation and make edits
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 .
Blue = within budget
Red = over 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!).
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.).
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.