Dunia, an app to measure your carbon footprint
"You can't improve what you don't measure". We had the pleasure of meeting Julien Derville, founder of Dunia, a mobile application that enables individuals to measure their carbon footprint and learn how to reduce their environmental impact.
Can you tell us more about Dunia? How did this project come about?
In 2019, I came across impact calculators where you have to answer around ten questions to find out your impact. I thought it was brilliant! You realise that everything you do in your life and every action you take has an impact. I fell in love with the concept, but I quickly realised that it had a few flaws. Two things were missing. Firstly, I was able to find out my environmental footprint, but I didn't receive any information on how to act on it. And yet there was a lot to tell me, particularly about mobility. So I was a bit disappointed because it wasn't personalised and there were no solutions proposed to reduce my impact. The second thing I noticed was that I had no way of tracking my impact. So to get my score back, I potentially had to redo the questionnaire. Which is a shame, because people like to keep track of their progress, like in sport, for example, where they can see their improvement over the month. And that wasn't the case for environmental impact.
One day I saw in a Linkedin post, someone pointing to his head next to his bank card and saying "if you're fed up with everyone blaming the government and companies, as individuals, we all have the power to act." It was obvious to me: everything goes through the monetary mindset and where you buy. I thought it would be great to be able to calculate the environmental impact, and then I discovered open banking, which gives access to bank data. Seeing all this accessible banking data and cross-referencing it with other subjects, I realised that it was possible to create an impact measurement tool based on banking data. So we set up the business in August 2020, and the Dunia application was officially launched on 1 December 2020.
How is your application part of a responsible consumption approach? In practical terms, how is Dunia helping the world to be a better place?
I don't know if we're helping the world to get better, but the important thing is to contribute, as Obvy is doing, in our own small way. Dunia's usefulness lies in the fact that the application enables people to become aware of their impact through measurement, so that they can take action. Our aim is to help as many people as possible to measure their impact in order to reduce it. As William Thomson said: "You can't improve what you don't measure". This is true and false, because you can still improve what you don't measure, but it's easier to know where to focus your efforts when you do measure. What's more, keeping track of your results helps you get into the swing of things.
In Dunia, there are also challenges. In fact, we give lots of little tips, and second-hand is one of them, but there are a hundred other solutions that you can use to reduce your impact. So we're not a direct solution, but we do try to be a tool and to highlight the companies offering solutions.
Dunia is a bit like a pocket eco-coach. How does the application work?
The registration process is simple: you just need to enter your first name and telephone number for authentication. Then, the most complicated step for some of our users is to connect their bank account to our application. It's easy to do, but it requires a huge amount of trust. Today, not everyone does it, and I understand that. The principle is as follows: the user connects their bank account and then the bank that the user has connected will send us each of their transactions. Typically, if the user carries out a transaction on Leboncoin or Paruvendu for example, we are notified, we get the description and the amount. From this description we will extract categories. For example, if the user goes to Total, the category will be 'fuel', and from this category we will estimate an associated impact based on Open Source data.
ADEME will tell us, for example, that 1 litre of diesel on average is x kilos of CO2, so we'll look at the price of petrol and calculate a monetary carbon ratio. So, for example, 1 euro spent on fuel is equivalent to 2.25 kilos of CO2. In total, we have 150 categories, some of which are more precise than others. Fuel, for example, is one of the relatively precise categories, as is electricity, since we know quite precisely how much energy is used by a household... but food, for example, is a little less precise. It's true that we don't know exactly what people put in their shopping trolleys. They could buy €100 worth of steak or €100 worth of apples, and the impact would obviously be very different. That's why, during the registration process, we ask users to fill in some additional information, in particular their diet and zero waste habits, to try and refine the food score as much as possible. But it remains an estimate.
We are probably the most accurate impact simulators, so we will sometimes overestimate the impact or even underestimate it. Then, one thing leading to another, we will have an impact that will compensate for itself and that will be a good representation of the real impact. In mathematics, we talk about the uncertainty rate, and we're in the process of calculating this uncertainty rate with a mathematician. It would be of the order of 15-20%. I would like to remind you that what we are providing is an estimate, the real carbon footprint, nobody is able to say precisely. The aim of all the simulators is to reduce this uncertainty as much as possible.
Given that you need to connect Dunia to your bank account... the question naturally arises: how can you ensure a high level of security for your users?
We go through an aggregator that is certified. It is ACPR banque de France approved (this is the security level for banks), and it is a third party that will check every month that the security level meets standard criteria. All banks have these obligations, and it's the same for all those who access this information, like Bankin'.
Bankin' will therefore manage all information deemed to be highly sensitive. Typically, the login and password to access your bank are very sensitive information and they are stolen, you can make money transfers, etc. So we chose the BtoB part of the Bankin' application. So we chose the BtoB part of the Bankin' application, a product called 'Bridge'. We go through them because they already provide more than 4.5 million banking connections. They are the market leader in France in this area.
Dunia was launched in a very special context... What impact did the pandemic have on Dunia?
As a team, we've had very little impact because we all work remotely: one of us is in Berlin, one in Amsterdam... We already have a very hybrid way of working. But in fact, the first confinement in particular made us aware of quite a few things. For example, I've never heard so much talk about environmental issues. And that's good, because it shows that companies and individuals really want to change, so that's great!
Then, in actual fact, because we were able to see what was happening through the bank data, we were able to see (particularly during the first lockdown) that the country was really at a standstill, particularly in terms of mobility. Mobility is a real vector of carbon footprint and we saw that the level of carbon footprint dropped completely. But even with a complete drop and a country at a standstill, we still weren't meeting the targets set out in the Paris Agreement. All this shows the huge step we all need to take together to reach the 2050 targets.
You allow companies to share their services/products with the Dunia community if they help to reduce their environmental impact. In your opinion, how can a company really help to reduce its environmental impact?
There's one subject that's very important to me. It's about making products and services that are sustainable, that last over time. This means that they must be repairable, reusable and recyclable.
For a company, I think it's a huge task to put an end to programmed obsolescence. It may not be voluntary, but I don't think that companies have focused their efforts on this subject in the way that they could. If all companies redirect their priorities to making products more durable, given that we will ultimately need less material, that will already be a great deal.
What's going on and what are your plans for 2021?
With regard to our news on the application, in the next few days users will no longer be required to connect their bank account. We've seen that half the people on the site don't do this, so we want to allow them to access the application, the challenges and so on, without having to connect their bank account. What's more, users will be able to personalise their goals. What really counts is the progress made by each individual rather than the result. That's why this system, where each user defines their own limit, is so important to us. Initially, we had set a limit, but it didn't matter, because if someone needs their car every day but manages to use it a little less, they're participating in their own way. It's better for everyone to take part than for a few to be singled out because they're certainly good at it.
Then, in the medium term, we'd like to work on the community aspect, because ecology is a subject that concerns a large number of people. We're also thinking about company ratings, to help individuals make better choices about the companies they buy from. We enable individuals to distinguish the real from the fake among companies that are genuinely committed to the environment and those that claim to be, and so on. So we're thinking about how to give users information about the environmental commitment of companies.
The final word?
A final word? Download the Dunia app!
Contacts
Website: Dunia.app