Researchers have used national-level spending and consumption data to help countries estimate their carbon footprints for decades. Joro takes the same approach and applies it to your spending to give you a personalized picture of your carbon impact.

With a connected credit or debit card, you don't need to manually enter information about your daily activity. Based on what you buy, Joro's proprietary Carbonizer algorithms estimate the impact of your consumption automatically.

By drawing a direct link between your purchases and your carbon footprint, Joro helps identify specific ways that you can make an impact.

To estimate the impact of a credit card purchase, Joro’s Carbonizer ties information about a purchase to national-level datasets on the carbon intensity of production, transportation, and end-of-life use across industries.

For example, the Carbonizer might identify that you spent $30 at The Gap. From there, it will multiply the average carbon intensity per dollar of the apparel industry - from the start of life to the end of life of a garment - by the dollar value of the transaction. The result is an estimate of the carbon footprint of your clothing purchase. As more users join and Joro's algorithms improve, the Carbonizer will get better and better at distinguishing purchases based on where you bought them from.

It's impossible for any single organization to accurately know the exact carbon footprint of each and every product out there. Joro’s Carbonizer doesn't aim to be 100% accurate. Instead, it intends to help you understand the most important drivers of your footprint to help you make decisions that matter.

For instance, instead of comparing the footprint of one brand of beef to another, we seek to reveal that the choice of chicken over beef is the one you should be relatively more concerned about. Over time, we'll help you develop an understanding of the impact of that choice versus that of buying second-hand clothes over new ones, or a bike ride over a ride-share.

The climate crisis is a collective action problem. In 2018, the landmark UN IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5C made clear that we have only until 2030 to mobilize all the solutions we can, as quickly as possible. We need sweeping policy change, and we need bold corporate action. Yet the key to accelerating solutions lies with us. Consumer choices influence over 65% of global greenhouse gas emissions Ivanova et al., 2016. Together, we have the power to create a bright, livable future for all life on earth.

Research shows that an average person can reduce their emissions by 5-25%, especially if they receive real-time information on their carbon footprint (Jones and Kammen, 2011) (Moran et al, 2018). We've seen some highly-committed users reduce their footprint by as much as 30-60%.

If we were all to reduce our emissions by a little, we would get a tenth of the way to achieving our global goal of cutting emissions in half by 2030, averting the worst consequences of the climate crisis. We can think of collective behavior change as buying ourselves time to shift to a fully-decarbonized society - flattening the curve of global emissions.

Behavior change is not only effective - it's one of the cost-efficient climate solutions we have. That's because consuming more responsibly is better for our wallets. Research shows that you can save hundreds of dollars per year for each ton of CO2e you shave off your carbon footprint, most notably from changing diets, traveling more sustainably, reducing energy use at home, and buying fewer, longer-lasting items (Jones and Kammen, 2011).

A carbon offset is created when one metric ton of greenhouse gas emissions is reduced. Companies, governments, and even people can buy carbon offsets to compensate for the emissions they create by investing in projects that reduce emissions.

Reducing emissions within our control by changing our own consumption is the most reliable way to draw down emissions. However, there will always be a portion we cannot reduce and to compensate, buying high-quality offsets can play an important role in creating demand for projects that reduce carbon emissions.

Not all carbon offsets are created equal. At Joro, we curate a set of high-quality offset projects so our community has peace of mind that their dollars are actively reducing greenhouse gas emissions.