A Breakthrough Way to Cut Carbon – Together as a Group
EcoCounts is a community experiment showing how diverse groups can work together to cut emissions fast. Our dual-membership approach supports those least responsible for the crisis while giving high emitters a practical, judgment-free way to change their impact.
It’s fair, supportive and backed by real data—an approach that helps everyone move further, faster, without guilt or barriers.
The Climate Challenge (and Why Current Approaches Aren’t Working)
Society urgently needs a new model of behaviour to tackle our destructive addiction to fossil fuels – but what? Nothing seems to work, despite our best efforts.
Why does individual action typically fail? There are no feedback loops, complete social isolation, and a continual background sense of shame that you are not doing enough. It all leads to the general opinion that the solution must be imposed from above – something we rarely get a chance to vote for.
Business seems to be split into two camps as well – those that ignore the issue, and a few that do engage but can only show a vague number for a vague metric called Scope 3.
Government policy changes are slow when they do appear, but are vulnerable to loopholes and roll-backs.
- The missing piece: a community-based, data-driven system that makes carbon reduction socially rewarding and visible.
The EcoCounts Breakthrough: A Social & Data Approach for Cutting Emissions
EcoCounts brings people with very different carbon footprints into one team and gives them a shared pathway to reduce emissions. No finger-pointing. No guilt. Just practical learning, collective motivation and clear data. This mix of diversity, solidarity and behavioural insight is what turns individual effort into a breakthrough community model for cutting CO₂ at scale.
This is a mutually reinforcing dynamic:
- High burners can reduce without moral judgement or compulsion
- People with low emissions gain recognition, support, practical resilience tools, and strength in numbers to demand change
- The whole group models what a fair future could look like with the EcoCore Carbon Accounts framework
How the Dual-Membership System Works
We use a balanced membership model made to be fair, socially powerful and financially sustainable.
- Fee-paying membership for our “high burners” and higher-income participants
- Supported membership for low-emissions members who want to learn, protest and contribute at EcoCounts Mondays
- The fee partially subsidises those most affected by the crisis but least responsible for causing it.
This is a new social contract for climate action. Our shared goals help build a motivated, supportive community.
EcoCounts Mondays: Weekly Climate Learning, Community Building, & Action
A rolling programme of workshops, talks, training sessions and film nights covering an extensive range of topics. Attendees learn:
- How to cut their impact
- How to build resilience to the local effects of climate chaos
- How to raise their collective voice
Attendees are encouraged to join up and become carbon footprint-monitoring members. Read more on EcoCounts Mondays and see the calendar here.
Attendance in person is at no cost – usually the low-carbon participants have low incomes too – the correlation between income and footprint is strong. Often people on a low income find few options to cut their own impact, so our program aims to promote that in a wide variety of ways.
The impacts of the climate crisis though are something that people with the lowest carbon footprints ironically feel the hardest – so here we provide information on how to survive and thrive, build resilience in your community, and protest and lobby for the many things that can be done to level out these injustices.
High-footprint members who cannot attend can join online for a supporting fee, access our community group online, share tips and tricks, and learn how to reduce their impact and keep on reducing it, cutting back on all the things that were never important in defining their sense of well-being.
At the end of the day, we hope to show how to decouple one’s spending from one’s impact.
Measuring Impact: Personal Carbon Footprints as a Continuous Learning Tool
Measuring progress with rigorous carbon data:
- Everyone records a baseline annual footprint, then monthly updates.
- Data builds a group-wide picture of progress.
- Participants can compare trends and learn from each other.
- This kind of innovation is just not available anywhere else.
The EcoCounts App: Turning Carbon Literacy Into Daily Practice
EcoCounts in collaboration with our student dev team from UCL is creating an app that features:
- Daily carbon logging
- Automated or assisted estimates
- Charts showing trends
- Red-flag moments
- Personalised reduction suggestions
- Optional group leaderboard options
The aim is to build a scalable, replicable carbon reduction tool.
Building a Carbon-Literate Community
Members learn the real emissions behind everyday choices. We focus on built-in carbon, whether made in the UK or abroad.
- Members learn to see the built-in emissions in everything we buy, do, and consume, regardless of where it was built
- High levels of carbon literacy drive more meaningful behaviour change than guilt-based messaging
- People take their carbon literacy with them wherever they go – whether it’s to work, or to their friends and family, or the polling booth
Content Creation: A Story Engine for Climate Policy Change
- Uses members’ personal experiences and discoveries to create compelling stories.
- Produces videos, podcasts, blogs, and social posts that show real-life carbon reduction in action.
- Highlights what personally affects members, making climate action relatable and demonstrating how anyone can reduce their footprint.
- Supports advocacy for UK carbon allowances via EcoCore Carbon Accounts.
Participatory Governance: Members Shape the Movement
It is EcoCounts’ ambition that our members will eventually self-manage the organisation. All participants will:
- Automatically become members of the EcoCounts charity
- Join quarterly assemblies on strategy, activities and direction
- Take part in shaping campaigns
- Provide the data and insights that allow continuous imporvements
Why This Model Works (the Theory of Change)
This is the logic that we maintain:
- Reduces emissions through behaviour change guided by frequent, continuous feedback
- Strengthens climate resilience in low-emission communities
- Empowers collective action through solidarity-based membership
- Generates policy-relevant data from real-world carbon tracking
- Creates public engagement content that shifts national narrative
- Demonstrates what a fair carbon allowance system could look like
These are the ingredients that provide the best chance of a breakthrough in the agonising grind of the climate crisis. Here is our theory of change.
Evidence, Early Results, and Prototyping Success
Some ad-hoc feedback is available now, but watch this space for our 2025 impact report
- “Thank you for a great workshop last night. It really helped me to do the workshop again following the previous session with you and others last month” (typical feedback).
- “I was grateful for the chance to express my fears and not be considered radical or childish.” (participants appreciate the chance to act).
- We have 25 carbon footprints from on 2023 members, 25 from 2024 and we are now recording our 2025 cohort
- We have two teams of students, one from UCL and one from Imperial College London, checking our assumptions and methodologies.
Vision: Scaling to a National Movement
- We work to grow a broad, representative membership that brings in people from all parts of society, helping us reflect the realities, interests, and pressures that different groups face
- We build our app to appeal to all types of potential members regardless of numeracy
- We develop a dataset demonstrating reduction pathways
- We tell a story of a citizen-driven mandate for carbon allowances
- We create local EcoCounts groups across the UK
Opportunities for Funders, Collaborators, and Participants
We invite funders to support app development, carbon data collection and management, workshops, research, supported memberships and group infrastructure.
We partner with collaborators such as community groups, councils, universities, and tech providers to expand our reach.
We encourage participants to join EcoCounts as members, track their carbon footprints, and help create the story. There are also many opportunities for members to volunteer to help keep EcoCounts moving forwards.