Cornell Project Team Creates Carbon Offsetting App

The Finger Lakes Climate Fund, launched by Sustainable Finger Lakes in 2010, aims to address the two major intertwined problems of income inequality and climate change by funding energy upgrades for low-income households. Carbon offset donations are already quick and straightforward on the Finger Lakes Climate Fund website — Engineers Without Borders, a Cornell University engineering project team, has taken things one step further by creating a carbon offsetting app. Ava Fasciano and Sophia Xu, members of the project team, shared their experiences with developing the app.

Sophia Xu explained how Engineers Without Borders’ mission is to use their engineering skills to help their surrounding communities.

“The Climate Fund app that we did was very in line with that [mission] — working with our local community to better the climate,” Sophia said.

The app will allow users to offset based on their own travel or by using the “quick offset” feature.

“A user can start by selecting the source of carbon emissions that they would like to offset, whether that be air travel, car travel, or building energy, and enter the relevant information to calculate the pounds of carbon that their activity generated. They can also choose a “quick offset”, such as the average carbon produced from eating meat or ordering Amazon packages in a year. These pounds of carbon are converted to a monetary value to be added to one’s cart and checked out,” Ava said.

In addition, the app also aims to educate users about the role that sustainability plays in their local communities and in their own everyday lives.

“The app also includes a “Donors and Awardees” section where the user can learn about the families in Tompkins County who are impacted by the green projects made possible through the donations generated by carbon offsetting. Finally, the user can learn about how to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle by browsing through the “green tips” page, saving certain tips to their profile that they wish to implement,” Ava said.

Ava spoke about how this project will have an overall positive impact on both Engineers Without Borders and Sustainable Finger Lakes, as the app will help both organizations achieve their goals.

“It was the perfect opportunity because both parties could benefit from each other. We needed the experience of creating an impactful app, and Sustainable Finger Lakes will benefit from this app allowing more people to carbon offset in an easy and quick way,” Ava said.

According to Sophia, finishing up the app felt very rewarding after two years of hard work, especially since there were challenges along the way.

“Since we’re all undergrad students, we definitely didn’t have a lot of industry experience in building an app. We really had to teach ourselves all of the tools, and the collaboration tools we used as well. And with that came expected challenges with learning the new documentation and the new languages, as well as just a lot of research,” Sophia said.

Ava added to this by explaining how many of the skills needed to successfully create an app are not taught in the classroom.

“I would say the biggest challenge is that mostly everything that we work on involving our app requires skills that we don’t learn in school, so a lot of self-teaching and peer mentoring is what led us to create the finished product,” Ava said.

Overall, Ava and Sophia said that this was one of their first opportunities to create something that has a lasting impact on their community, and that this project will be a great way to highlight Engineers Without Borders and its mission.

The Climate Fund app will be available to download later this spring.

East Hill Notes are published the first and third Wednesdays of each month in Tompkins Weekly.