Funding

1. Opening Hook

Here's a strange truth: even people who study climate change for a living, work at environmental NGOs, or teach sustainability don't reduce their own daily carbon footprint any more than the average person does.

The Visible Carbon Project (VCP) exists to answer one question: if knowledge alone doesn't change behavior, what does? Our answer is psychological ownership — the felt sense that “this carbon is mine to change.”

 

2. The Problem

Awareness has never been higher. In Korea, national surveys show the vast majority of citizens rank climate change as a top environmental concern, and most report real anxiety about it. Yet when asked how to act, more than half say they simply don't know concrete steps to take.

Governments declare carbon-neutrality targets. Companies publish ESG reports. Schools expand environmental curricula. Even large cash-incentive programs for low-carbon behavior have reached only a small fraction of the adult population. Every lever has been pulled except one: the psychological design of the experience itself.

• Information campaigns and stronger messaging have not closed the knowledge-to-action gap.
• Even climate professionals show daily emissions similar to the general public.
• Existing incentive programs see low, stagnant enrollment despite meaningful rewards.

 

3. Our Hypothesis

We believe this is not a willpower problem — it's a design problem. When people can see their carbon footprint change in real time, and feel that their personal choices meaningfully move the number, they develop psychological ownership over the outcome. That ownership, not extra information, is what drives sustained behavior change.

We further hypothesize that people who understand climate issues most deeply may carry an unspoken cognitive dissonance between what they know and how they live — and that surfacing this gap through visualization could produce faster, stronger behavior change than in the general public, though it may also trigger avoidance in some cases.

 

4. How We'll Test It

We are recruiting 60 participants across three groups: climate professionals, environmentally engaged citizens, and a control group shown only a general goal with no visualization. Each participant logs energy, food, and transport habits in a lightweight mobile app for under 3 minutes a day.

The app automatically estimates each person's carbon footprint and reflects it back in relatable terms — for example, “today you saved the equivalent of 0.3 trees.” Participants set a weekly carbon budget and review results every Sunday. The 4-month program runs in two learning cycles, so what we learn in the first two months directly shapes the intervention design for the second two.
 

5. What Success Looks Like

Metric	What We're Measuring
Psychological ownership score	Weekly self-report across cognitive, behavioral, and social dimensions
Behavior change rate	Monthly carbon reduction vs. baseline, compared across all three groups
Avoidance-response threshold	Correlation between dissonance intensity and disengagement, to find the tipping point where intervention backfires

Whatever the outcome, we will extract three concrete design principles for carbon-visualization programs and submit them as a formal feedback proposal to Korea's national carbon-neutrality incentive program — with school curricula and carbon-labeling policy as the next targets.

 

6. Our Team

We are a five-person team spanning behavioral research, app development, and environmental education, united by one belief: the climate gap between knowing and doing can be closed by design, not just willpower.

 

7. Where Your Funding Goes

Use of Funds	Allocation	Amount
Participant rewards (60 people, 4 months)	30%	$1,800
Behavioral science & environmental psychology consultation	26%	$1,560
Operations (5-person team, 4 months)	20%	$1,200
App infrastructure & data analysis tools	16%	$960
Contingency reserve	8%	$480

 

8. Call to Action

Back the Visible Carbon Project and help us prove that the missing piece in climate action isn't more information — it's the feeling that your choices matter. Every contribution funds real experimental infrastructure: participant rewards, expert consultation, and the data tools needed to turn this into evidence policymakers can act on.

 

Funding Period: June 1, 2026 – August 31, 2026