What a year of progress for citizen science and for my own personal carbon reduction journey to net zero.
Martin Brocklehurst – AURORA Partner and Chair of the Citizen Science Global Partnership – personal reflections
I have used the AURORA Energy Tracker app to measure my carbon emissions and have over a year’s data. It is easy to use and takes very little time to complete data entry. It is a really great tool that I commend to everyone in Europe to use. Outside Europe we need partners prepared to adopt the tool and pioneer its use in different continents. Within the project we are developing a route map on how this can be done in order that we can encourage a truly global tool to be developed. So check in on the website to see how we get on.
To show how useful the tool is, let me share my AURORA app carbon footprint data for heating and powering our home in the UK and from the transport decisions my wife and I took in 2024. Also shown is my position on the AURORA Labelling Scheme which for the UK is as follows.
For heating and powering our UK home and for all travel in the UK and Ireland, plus our personal flights my wife and I are A+ Accomplishers on the AURORA Energy Label scheme. We are thousands of pounds better off as a direct consequence. Lower heating energy bills, virtually zero electricity bills and rapidly diminishing travel costs as we switch to electric vehicles or public transport for all our land based journeys during the year. Even with one personal flight we still maintain our rating.
The remaining challenge the AURORA app has highlighted is how I resolve the carbon footprint for my business flights. The 7 business flights to attend EU and UN Environmental and Climate Change events take my carbon footprint from being A+ Accomplisher to G (Ground Breaker).
The AURORA Energy Tracker app has brought into sharp focus that I need to do more to switch to public transport for journeys in Europe in 2025 and to offset trips to UN Meetings by investing in Community Energy Projects in the UK. The plan for 2025 is therefore to firstly use online tools for meetings, then to use road, rail, coach and ferry travel for European journeys where this is feasible, and finally to offset international travel with investments in community energy schemes through the AURORA project. It is not acceptable to just fly and do nothing, as if somehow I have no personal responsibility. I spend a lot of my time in Ireland and the UK. This means whilst trips from the UK to Europe are possible by train, my journeys into Europe from Ireland with no effective land based routes available are much more difficult. I remain committed to doing all I can to encourage the growth of citizen science programmes to tackle carbon pollution, but at the same time to drive my own carbon journey as rapidly as possible to net zero carbon.
I look forward to citizen scientists globally joining me in this journey. So please download the AURORA Energy Tracker app and share your experiences through the LinkedIn Group Citizen Science and Climate Change. Please do not stand ideally by and do nothing.
#Climate Change #AURORAH2020 #Citizen Science #EnergyConservation #EU Climate #Law
Martin Brocklehurst
Chair Citizen Science Global Partnership
EU Climate Pact Ambassador
EU AURORA Project – Tackling Climate Change Partner
