In April of this year, Sanchali Pal (MBA 2018) launched Joro—an app that works like a Fitbit for your carbon footprint. Joro assigns a carbon score to users’ credit card purchases and then connects users with offsets they can buy to mitigate their footprint. Part of Pal’s motivation for building Joro was that she wanted a tool that would not only allow her to better measure the impact of her lifestyle on climate change, but that would also give users a step-by-step path to make a difference in the face of what can seem like an overwhelming challenge.

In this episode of Skydeck, Associate Editor Jen Flint talks to Pal about the pandemic’s impact on both her business and on global carbon emissions, and the insight it can offer us about tackling climate change.

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Jen Flint: I'm assuming this pandemic was not a part of your business plan, so what has it meant for you, how have you had to adapt?

Sanchali Pal: Definitely not. Our initial plan was actually to do a public launch of the app and of the company in April this year for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. And that was very much overshadowed by the new global crisis of the pandemic. It affected us in that we did a much smaller launch of our new version of the app. We still put our product out there and still have had really good reception, given the current environment. The way that we're seeing it as an opportunity to learn from how to help people make effective changes that align with this new time and how they want to live their lives.

For instance, we just did a piece last week on going Zero Waste. And in the current world, going zero waste is extremely impractical, especially when everything comes in plastic and sometimes that's really useful for hygiene. But there are certain ways that are new and different that we can think about reducing our waste, given the fact that we're all living at home, for instance, cleaning up our home beauty care routines, using fewer plastic items in our own beauty care routines or buying more from farmer's markets or local stores that don't use as much plastic. It's basically for us meant a shift in how we think about helping people adapt their lifestyles and the types of behaviors we encourage them to focus on. Recognizing that there's a lot of big wins people are making right now because their emissions are dropping because they're not going on those long trips that they had planned on doing otherwise and thinking more about how we can adjust our routines in our home life. And I think it's also caused us to more broadly think in the product about how we can better include life events and how we help people plan. COVID isn't the only life event that's going to happen to our users. People have children. People move homes or cities. How do we think about helping people understand their shifting carbon footprint when they have a big life event?

Jen Flint: One of the side effects of this crisis has been that we all abruptly stopped getting in our cars and boarding airplanes, we stopped all kinds of activities that also had the effect of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. Can you put some context around those effects? What do the data show about how significant that's been or how long lasting it might be?

Sanchali Pal: Overall, it's certainly been true that the pandemic and the resulting quarantine has resulted in a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which is a good thing—the silver lining for climate. On average, those reductions are projected to be somewhere between 5 to 10 percent for the year. Now those are really rough estimates, and we actually don't have really good tools or data on real real-time monitoring on carbon emissions right now. So those are just guesses. But at the most extreme points, for instance, in April in the US we saw a reduction of closer to 20 to 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. And certainly at the peak in many countries the reduction in emissions was closer to 40 percent. So that's really encouraging. The 5 to 10 percent number might sound small, but it's actually quite large, considering that the Paris climate goals ask us to try to reduce global emissions by 7 percent year on year for the next 10 years to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. So the fact that we're achieving this year's targets by basically doing nothing else except for fighting the pandemic is pretty amazing. And specifically where that comes from, we think about carbon footprints in four categories, at least at the consumer level: travel, food and drink, shopping, and home energy use. And travel has been the largest contributor to the reduction in emissions as we might expect.

And even residential building energy use, food and drink, a shift away from dining and restaurants, which are generally less efficient in their energy use than homes. And some reduction in consumption, although probably that's going to be the thing that bounces back most quickly and already has bounced back in many ways across the world.

In terms of how long this will last, that's a question that depends a lot on how long our new way of living lasts. I think there's certainly indications that some aspects of our new way of living are here to stay. For instance, the pervasiveness of remote work, the reduction in business travel will be longer-term contributors to reduce CO2. Potentially people being more comfortable cooking at home—cooking more plant-based meals at home could also be a longer-term reduction. Maybe the less office space, more home energy use, residential buildings tend to be more efficient with energy use. So some of those changes might result in longer term reductions and certainly will buy us some time to implement better policies potentially as part of the recovery.

Jen Flint: And what about personal spending—that's been central to the estimates that you're able to produce for people to identify a person's carbon footprint. And we saw personal spending habits really change significantly once we were all isolating at home.

Sanchali Pal: Yeah, two things. One is we've certainly seen people's footprints, the composition of their footprints changes as personal spending changes in this time. I personally can give my own data as an example. Previously, about 50 percent of my carbon footprint was travel and then food, home, and shopping were about equal parts of the remaining half. Now my carbon footprint is almost half home and half food because that's basically all I do anymore. There’s probably some shopping in there, but almost no travel at all. It certainly changed the composition of our carbon footprints and like I mentioned also hopefully we'll be able to adapt our suggestions to people where to focus their energy based on how people’s spending is changing.

Also, it's forcing us to think more about the non-spending aspects of someone's carbon footprint. Right now, we ask people for some survey information to tell us about their home energy use, because many of us don't pay our utility bills on our credit card or for users who choose not to connect a card and would prefer to answer questions instead. How do we make those estimates more accurate or how do we account for things like the fact that a grocery bill should be reflecting someone's food consumption for a week, not just for a day? Those are some of the types of questions in our estimates that we initially hadn't addressed. And now we're really trying to break our estimates down a little bit more to be able to guide people beyond their daily spending, since daily spending isn't as useful a record anymore.

Jen Flint: And consumerism isn't necessarily a win for the planet either, right? Shopping can be helpful in getting the economy back up and running but more products filling our homes is not going to be helpful long-term in our climate goals. Can you talk more about how you think people might reconcile those two things?

Sanchali Pal: Yes, I think that's a really interesting point and I've been really struck by how much in the media we've been hearing that using our spending power is such a heroic thing to do now, helping your local businesses. And to some extent, I think that's a great thing to think about. Obviously, there's a huge amount of consumption in jobs that are at risk now because people are not spending money in the same way. On the other hand, I think work from home is a great analogy: Just like we'll probably continue working in many professions, but we'll do it in a very different way than we did before, I think we should think about consumption the same way. We're very likely to continue consuming in the future. We all need clothes and things for our home and food. But maybe we can think about spending our dollars in a different way. And I think that's really... I'm very optimistic about this moment as a time in which people are reconsidering where they choose to buy from and what it means. The Black Lives Matter movement is another great example of forcing us to think about where do we spend our dollars and who does it support? And I think that's a mindset that will be helpful for climate and for many other related initiatives to try to improve the future, not just go back to what was normal, but create a better normal after the pandemic.

Jen Flint: Talk more about this moment as an opportunity, with this reckoning around the effects of the coronavirus and climate change that are both disproportionately affecting communities of color. How can we make more of this moment and this convergence?

Sanchali Pal: What really strikes me about this moment is that it is all of these three issues—the pandemic, racial justice, and climate justice—are incredibly intertwined in that the root reasons why communities of color and poor and vulnerable communities are most affected is because of power structures and the way that our economy rewards the people at the top. It's fascinating to me that all of this is happening in an election year because it's so much more impactful and sort of intense than it would be otherwise. And through the last few years, this is really something I didn't understand before I started working on climate full time, as I started building Joro a couple years ago—but climate justice and racial justice are really the same issue of an imbalance in power structures and the fact that our economic system doesn't account for the negative externalities of pollution, injustice, etc.

And that's why I think it's even more important to emphasize the connections between the issues that we're facing so that we can address them more quickly and more powerfully together. I'm so encouraged to see climate movements and racial justice movements coming together in places like Flint or with the Dakota Access Pipeline, because when we realize that there's multiple negative effects to a certain path forward is when we can try to take action on it.

The moment we're in I think is really interesting because the policy that we want to enact in the future recovery, the post-COVID recovery, we can be intentional about building climate and racial justice into those policies. And that's where I'm really curious about how we can put our efforts to make a big change relatively painlessly. We’re already going through so much upheaval. Let's use this moment to be productive.

Jen Flint: Are there ideas or lessons you think that people who work on climate can learn from the response to this pandemic in this moment?

Sanchali Pal: Definitely. I have been so impressed by the public health community's ability to communicate this virus to the population. As someone who spends my time thinking about how to communicate an invisible, deadly crisis that's creeping up on us, I have been so impressed by the flattening-the-curve analogy and how well that's been taken up by the population overall. So I think there's a lot we can learn about metaphors and visual language and how we can help people understand a crisis through those tools. That's exactly the same thing that we're trying to do with climate change. The role of collective action in making changes in our lives to try to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions is very similar to trying to wear masks and use hand sanitizer and buy ourselves some time until we get a vaccine. It's just like buying ourselves some time until we can capture enough carbon or innovate our way out of this challenge. It's the low hanging fruit that people and collective action can have power over.

The idea of having a plant-based diet is kind of similar to the idea of wearing a mask. It’s a thing I can do, I have control over. If I do it by myself it doesn't matter at all. But if millions of us do it together, we can have significant impact on the long-term trajectory of the crisis. That's the type of language and messaging that I'm hoping that we can learn from for climate.

Jen Flint: So it's empowering people to be a part of the solution.

Sanchali Pal: Yes, and to realize that solutions don't come from somewhere else. The solution doesn't necessarily come from the federal government or from Wal-Mart. The solution comes from lots of us deciding that we are going to do what it takes to solve this problem. And companies and governments will follow our lead as citizens and customers, making sure that they respond to us.

Skydeck is produced by the External Relations department at Harvard Business School and edited by Craig McDonald. It is available at iTunes and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

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