Gamifying decarbonisation - are you up to the challenge?

Are you a problem solver who thrives on a challenge? Do you want to take action on climate change? The Cambridge Carbon Challenge is a unique initiative for student and staff teams to develop and present their ideas for cutting carbon emissions and you could be part of the action.

For this year’s carbon challenge, the University of Cambridge’s Living Lab for Sustainability has teamed up with Cambridge Zero to identify ways to gamify decarbonisation. Gamifying uses typical elements of game playing (like point scoring, competition with others, and rules of play) or underlying concepts drawn from game theory to incentivise action.

Entries could involve anything from the deeply practical, for example, an add-on to a banking app that calculates carbon emissions based on spend and compares it to a local average, through to much more creative ideas like a pokemon go inspired game to encourage waste reduction, with an app dragon emerging every time waste goes into the wrong bin!

Solutions can be tech-based but don’t have to be, it could be a brilliant system for generating competition between neighbours to limit their household waste or even policy solutions inspired by behavioural nudges.

We will be looking for student and staff teams of 4-6 members to work together over the next two months to develop and craft ideas that use gamifying concepts and apply them to decarbonising the environment. We are searching for innovative ideas that can be applied to the real world and projects that could be run in Cambridge initially and then scaled up nationally or internationally.

Sign up to the launch event and the Ideas Jam to find out more.