GreenWatch is an iOS app designed to motivate, ease, and bring hope to the fight against climate change.
By allowing individuals to hold the biggest contributors to climate change — governments and corporations — accountable, GreenWatch helps individuals put their time toward meaningful actions. And, by letting users also examine and mitigate their own largest climate-affecting actions, GreenWatch helps the everyday person feel confident that they are doing their part to save our natural world.
When a user enters the app, their feed is populated with recent articles (powered by Google’s News API to provide timely, reliable sources) relating to climate change. This helps fulfill the most important action individuals can take to protect the environment: staying informed about the current state of our planet and recent actions related to climate. For future development: ability to show scientific articles relating to climate change, helping users know the full scope of the climate crisis and have tools at their disposal to educate others.
GreenWatch gets its name from the idea of keeping an eye on those with power in the world. On this tab, a user can allow location permissions or search for a location to see a list of government officials serving that region, plus methods to contact each official. note that this feature will only work for locations in the United States. Additionally, the user gets a news feed featuring their elected officials — so that it’s easier than ever to find out what their officials have been doing recently and provide direct feedback. Feel free to use this feature to contact your politicians about issues other than climate change! in fact, climate justice ties in closely with other forms of activism. For future development: voting information widget, ability to filter for which officials to show news.
This tab will provide timely recommendations to the user about how to reduce their carbon footprint. corporations and governments have the biggest impact on the environment, but doing small actions in their day to day life can help an individual have hope and stay motivated in their efforts to protect the environment. plus, every small effort helps! notably, this tab will also provide shortcuts for users to purchase carbon offsets, allowing them to mitigate their largest-impact actions (usually long distance travel, especially by airplane). In this way, GreenWatch helps users also keep an eye on their own footprint, and prioritize mitigating their worst actions before doing making less effectual changes to their habits.
I’m planning to implement an industry tab, where I will use supervised machine learning to analyze environmental data relating to different corporations, allowing me to grade companies on their climate actions and give each a rating. Companies will be sorted by industry, and by clicking on a company, the user will be able to see information about why the company received their rating, the company’s mission statement, and other pertinent information. Companies with sufficiently high ratings will have links to purchase from, so that users can shop from within the app, feeling confident that they are supporting climate-friendly businesses.
This project is not yet on the App Store, and would need to undergo some changes before it could be listed. This would include changing the APIs used to provide unlimited free access to the information needed to power the app. If listed on the App Store, GreenWatch will remain free to allow for anyone to join the climate fight.
I created the preliminary designs shown in this ReadMe on Figma. The final app may differ slightly from the designs as new UI/UX considerations emerge throughout the implementation process.