New climate app will help individuals reduce their carbon footprint

Climate app Klima launched its new beta app on Wednesday, with help from a $5.8 million seed round. Klima CEO Markus Gilles joins Yahoo Finance’s on The move panel to weigh in on the company’s outlook.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: There's a new app that's being launched that's aimed at helping individuals measure their climate impact and hopefully mitigate it, to some extent. The CEO of that company behind that app is joining us now. It's called Klima, and he is Markus Gilles. He's joining us from Berlin. So Markus, talk to us about how this app is going to work.

MARKUS GILLES: Hi there, very happy to. Klima is a climate app for individuals and that is meant to make individual climate action extremely easy and effective for everyone. So how it works is you get into the app, and you calculate your carbon footprint-- your personal carbon footprint-- based on a couple of lifestyle questions that we provide. And next up, we offer you to neutralize your personal emissions by funding climate projects around the world that take down the same amount of CO2 from the atmosphere or prevent the same amount of CO2 from being emitted, as so-called emission reduction.

And since CO2 disperses into the atmosphere very directly around the globe, it doesn't matter where the emission reduction takes place. So it can be anywhere in the world. And by that, individuals can offset their personal carbon footprint and thereby, take their footprint off the planet, live carbon neutrally. So this is the first step. And then the second step, we go a bit beyond and help people also to reduce their footprints in the future.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Markus, I'm just curious, and you're talking to a man who has a V8-engine-powered car, although like most New Yorkers, it sits in a garage most of the year. What's our average footprint? What are the people using the app finding?

MARKUS GILLES: Yeah, so this depends on the country. We're rolling out in 18 countries. In America, in the United States, it's 16.5 tons on average. But obviously, it varies very much on your individual lifestyle. And so if you're taking a lot of flights or if you, you know, drive a car a, lot these kind of things obviously matter. Diet is a big differentiator, for example, as well. So all these things factor in. But on average, you can-- an average American would be able to offset and neutralize their personal carbon footprint for about $20 a month.

RICK NEWMAN: Hey Markus, Rick Newman here. How does the app actually measure your footprint? Do you have to input all this data about what you do on a daily basis, or does it have some tracking capability the way, you know, the Apple Health app, for instance, can tell how many steps you take? /

MARKUS GILLES: Yeah, very good question. It's none of the above. The core idea behind Klima was to make carbon neutrality radically easy. That meant for us two things. We wanted to avoid any barriers of entry that people might have. One of them would be to input data every day and, like, log every coffee to go that you purchased, et cetera, which normally is a recipe for high user churn. And you do it maybe for a week, but then it becomes tiresome.

And the other thing that we found problematic is to track the connecting, like, to other digital devices or something like that because it can become a data security nightmare quickly. And also, you leave a lot of things on the table at the end of the day. So it often turns out to be a bad calculation.

RICK NEWMAN: So how do you do it? How do you do it?

MARKUS GILLES: What we do is we ask you general questions about your lifestyle. So for example, how big is your home? What does to your diet look like? What kind of shopper are you? Do you live in a bigger house or small apartment-- so questions that are more generalized and make-- create a profile of you-- of your footprint or your lifestyle in general.

And then on the emission reduction side, we also look to what's sustainable, long-term lifestyle changes. So users can reduce their emissions then if they're ready to change something on a more permanent basis-- for example, to say every day, I take-- every year, I take three long-distance flights. You know what? Let's make that only two. So these are the kind of long-term behavioral changes that we encourage in the app.

JULIA LA ROCHE: So let's talk a bit about kind of consumer inertia and downloading an app. I mean, there's so many different apps out there. So how do you get people onboard with it? And then to add onto that, the accountability part-- I get that it can, you know, kind of show you what you're doing and where you can make changes. But maybe, like, is there going to be, like, some sort of social network accountability where it's-- if I have a fitness app and I could see my friends were out running, you know, eight miles and maybe I want to get out and run or something like that-- how do you think about that part?

MARKUS GILLES: Exactly. That's exactly what we are setting out to do. So the big mission of Klima is to connect individual action with collective impact. So as we're growing the app more and more, this will become a big focus on what we are growing out, this community and networking parts, similar to what you suggested.

But already, right now, users have the ability to see very much in detail the impact that they are creating everyday. We-- it's a so-called impact tracker that we have in the app that shows you everyday, how many trees have I've been planting? How many kilowatt hours of solar energy have I been-- have I made possible, et cetera, et cetera. And these milestones, you can share with friends already and inspire other people to maybe try out the same thing and have that effect of becoming a climate advocate already through the app and its sharing features.

But this, in the future, will tie in much more back into a community where I can compare myself with others. We want to add, you know, elements of gamification and all that good stuff because we understand that in order to make climate neutrality a mass movement, it's not enough to make it easy. That is the first part. The second part is you also need to make it joyful for people and something that they are proud of and something that feels rewarding to yourself, but also inspiring to others.

JULIE HYMAN: Markus, thanks for joining us. Markus GIlles is the CEO of Klima.

MARKUS GILLES: Thank you.

JULIE HYMAN: Thanks. Be right back.