LeafyJolly

LeafyJolly is designed to solve both ecosystem degradation and climate crisis simultaneously as ecosystem and climate resilience are inseparable. We solve two issues; 1) Despite its substantial contribution to climate change, the carbon emitted by individuals and small businesses is overlooked 2) Deforestation emits a large portion of carbon and losses countless trees, including its carbon sinking function.

LeafyJolly is created to help everyone, especially households and small businesses, reducing carbon footprints through a behavioural change in a fun, motivating, and sustainable way. Through a gamification system that follows a mitigation hierarchy, this platform will create long-term impacts, not just greenwashing carbon emission. 

User's payment for offsetting unavoidable carbon footprints will go to promote forest restoration and protection initiatives in the globally important, most threatened landscape. Indirectly, user's behavioural change will collectively reduce carbon emission, resulting in resilience ecosystems and climate.

Many efforts, such as reducing carbon emission in various sectors, have been done to keep ecosystems resilient under global climate change. Governments have started to enforce large industries to reduce and offset their carbon emission. 

However, the current trend of global carbon emission seems to keep rising, meaning that current efforts are not effective enough. We identified the root causes of the ineffectiveness of current efforts. 

• Firstly, despite looking minor and insignificant, collective individuals and households are emitting a large portion of carbon emission. However, they are less engaged in carbon reduction scheme, indicated by most carbon policies that are applied for big firms. 
• Secondly, having the mentality of being insignificant, many individuals do not feel responsible to reduce carbon emission, making them less motivated. 
• Thirdly, carbon reduction platforms focus on a short-term solution to be a silver bullet, such as a one-time tree planting, without considering a long-term behavioural change of the community. 

Therefore, there is an urgent need to create a sense of collective responsibility and to effectively engage individuals’ participation in changing their behaviour towards a carbon-free lifestyle.

LeafyJolly is a personalized and fun mobile app with gamified features of long-term carbon calculation, personalized carbon advisory, and offsetting unavoidable carbon. We incorporate dynamic interactions among users in competing to reduce carbon footprints, peer-supporting in like-minded groups, and sharing motivational posts. To be a real impactful platform, not just having a green label and greenwash carbon positive activities, we ensure and promote users to follow the mitigation hierarchy, which is to avoid, reduce, and minimize carbon emission before offsetting the remaining carbon footprints. We emphasize users' positive behavioural change by regularly recording user's activities and rewarding them accordingly.

LeafyJolly aims to motivate people and changing their habit in effectively reducing carbon emission in the long term, including offsetting unavoidable emission scheme. There are many carbon offsetting platforms out there, but these are either boring, unmotivating, unsustainable, or even worsening the climate as they greenwash carbon-producing activities. In addition, most of the carbon reduction schemes are targeting large companies. Therefore, our market targets are overlooked communities, including persons, households, and small businesses.

Therefore, LeafyJolly hopes to offer a fun, motivating and personalized way to sustainably encourage our users to change their daily habits into a climate-friendly lifestyle, following mitigation hierarchy (avoid, reduce, minimize). We will also record the user's behavioural change and give reward accordingly. Users are encouraged to offset unavoidable carbon emission by financially supporting forest restoration and protection initiatives.

Payment for our carbon offsetting scheme will be allocated for supporting tree planting and forest protection initiatives in globally important and vulnerable ecosystems in tackling climate change. Tree planting projects that we support will be either restoration of natural ecosystem or social forestry, depending on the project sites. Restoration ecosystem is usually conducted in the sites where people are not living around and endangered species are found in that site. Meanwhile, social forestry projects are usually performed in sites that are in proximity to the human settlement, allowing community participation in forest planting while giving financial benefits to the marginal communities.

Given that forest provides ecosystem services to the local and global scale, supporting tree planting and forest protection will also support ecosystem resilience to the climate change while benefiting local people from ecosystem services, such as clean water, landslide prevention, and provider for forest-based natural products. Moreover, tree planting and forest protection are clearly the most efficient, most viable, and cost-effective tools to combat climate change. Eventually, ecosystem and climate issues are impacting people globally without boundaries. Therefore, our platform will indirectly benefit everyone living on this planet.

LeafyJolly has two sides of the solutions that are linked closely. Given that climate resilience determines ecosystem resilience, we want to effectively and sustainably address carbon emission issues by facilitating our users to step-by-step behavioural change to reduce their carbon emission in engaging and fun ways. On the other hand, we want to financially support tree planting and forest protection that are neglected. Therefore, our solution will serve our users, especially individuals, households, and small businesses in the urban areas, as well as organizations and local communities in the rural areas as our beneficiaries. 

We already have the concept that is ready to be realised into a real mobile app, followed by app testing. However, before testing the product, developing a high-quality mobile application requires financial capitals. Therefore, we are still looking for some funding to support this initial step. In term of the partner building, we have got in touch with some grass-root organizations working on forest restoration and protection in rural areas of Indonesia. We are convinced that once the platform is ready, we can start testing the effectiveness of the platform soon after that.

We have 3 key features that make our solution innovative and stands out differently comparing to our competitors.

Fun and engaging: Reducing carbon footprints sounds like a big challenge and pressure. To make the users feel it achievable and hassle-free, we are developing a platform with gamification and reward systems. In addition, our platform allows the users to interact with each other, such as competing for better performance and peer-support groups. Therefore, we will bring a fun and engaging atmosphere to the users.

Sustainable and effective: Many carbon offsetting platforms works solely on reducing the current state of user’s carbon footprints. According to the mitigation hierarchy, the long-term environmental solution should follow the mitigation hierarchy, which is to avoid, reduce, and minimize before offsetting the unavoidable carbon emission. Unfortunately, other platforms do not consider it, making their efforts not effective and rather pure greenwashing of carbon emission by letting users emit carbon freely as long as they pay for the carbon offsetting scheme. Therefore, we focus on behavioural change of the users that could create more sustainable carbon reduction and effectively.

Personalized: There are already a bunch of “carbon-calculator” platforms that estimate carbon emission, merely on how much do the users emit, in a single time. In addition, it does not come with specific advice for the users to implement in their daily life. By identifying user’s detailed information, including potential ways or instruments that the users possess regularly our platform can provide tailored advice along with their day-by-day activities.

As LeafyJolly is currently in the initial stage, we have not served anyone. However, we have engaged our potential beneficiaries and key stakeholders in the development of the solution. During the first year, we will develop the mobile application. Once the mobile application is launched, we will start promoting the mobile application in countries where our members are from (Indonesia, Hongkong, India, and Denmark)

In the first year, we estimate to engage 1000 users and 2 NGOs as our beneficiaries from the carbon offsetting scheme. Assuming that there are 5 villages in the surrounding area of the restoration project, we will benefit some of these people from employment and economical benefit obtained from developing the forest-based product as well as ecosystem services provided by the restored forests. In the next 5 years, we expect to expand with an estimation of 10.000 users, 6 organizations of key organisation partners, 10 active project sites, with many villagers receive various benefits from the forest restoration and protection initiatives.

LeafyJolly is aligned with three UN SDGs, which are Responsible Consumption and Production, Climate Action, and Life on Land and we will measure our impact accordingly. In general, we measure the impacts from the regular monitoring that records users’ behavioural changes that could be converted into carbon and consumption reduction. Through our carbon offsetting scheme, we will also record the amount of tree planted in a certain area of land. Therefore, LeafyJolly will be able to measure impacts on consumption, carbon emission, and the area of reforested or protected forests. LeafyJolly will measure impacts in two ways, individual user impacts and user community impacts. Individual user impacts are impacts made by each user that can be accessed by the users. For the community impacts, LeafyJolly will sum up the carbon reduction, consumption reduction, and area being forested made by all users. LeafyJolly will transparently display both impacts to the users to motivate and raise the user’s awareness that their collective acts make a real difference.

Four part-time staffs. Planning to recruit technical members to develop the software.

Given that LeafyJolly lies in the intersection between the natural environment, software development, and business, our team composition is a perfect match. Our current team members have a background in natural environmental science, business, UX/UI designer, and computer science and engineering.

Mukhlish Jamal (Team lead) is an ecologist with specific expertise in forest ecology and nature-based solution for climate change. His experience supports the backbone concept of the idea, making the solution straightforwardly impactful and based on scientific evidence in solving climate crisis through the nature-based solution.

Noel Cheung is a designer with system thinking with several working experiences as UX/UI designer. His expertise helps the team to design mobile apps that are user friendly with integrated features for changing users behaviour.

Ioana Gheorghe is a business and marketing specialist, particularly on B2B marketing. Her working experiences and expertise help the team in creating a financially profitable business plan as well as effective marketing strategies.

Vansh Bhatia has engineer with a minor in computer science backgrounds and working experience in the tech company, allowing him to support the team in software system development.

Our team consist of members of both genders who come from different countries (Indonesia, Hongkong, Denmark, and India), both developing and developed countries. We have no formal headquarter as everything is online, allowing inclusivity without geographical borders. All members have equal rights in developing ideas. Our solution allows everyone to equally contribute to reducing carbon emission and supporting forest restoration initiatives. Having diverse team members, we will be able to reach users in various background, expanding the inclusion value from the team to the users. 

• Personally, the team leader was intrigued to know that governments have failed to address these issues despite setting up climate goals, which indicates that the government's plans are not tackling the problem straightforwardly. In addition, We, humans, keep doing business as usual, like people who know that their homes are on fire but keep fuelling it. Moreover, the team leader feels disappointed with many carbon offsetting platforms that are not solving the climate crisis, even worsening it. They allow their clients to produce carbon as much as their clients want as long as they get money to greenwash the carbon emission. They tend to accommodate those who have money, making carbon offsetting seem luxurious to those who cannot afford it.
• LeafyJolly provides a solution that is well-aligned to the MIT Solve the mission in tackling the most pressing challenges in the world, some of them are climate crisis and ecosystem degradation.
• MIT solve will provide an award that will be sufficient to make the idea into a real mobile application and mentorship to develop the entrepreneurial skills that will be useful, especially for the team leader who has no prior formal training on that topic.
• Being selected will gain LeafyJolly publicity, improving the public attention to use our platform.

We hope that we have team members with that expertise, otherwise, we are fine with working with professional that offers those services.

We have not specified any partner we would like to work with. For inclusivity, we welcome everyone, organizations, MIT faculty or initiatives, or solve members to be our partners in developing the concepts and application.

We are also seeking potential donors and investors who are willing to support this solution.

However, we are hoping to engage more environmental organizations to help the marketing, software engineers to help to develop the application and industries that want to invest in our initiatives.

The GM Prize is open to solutions that help sustainable communities around the world, which is relevant to our solution that help people to reduce carbon emission and support nature sustainability. We will use the prize for software development, stakeholder engagement process, and marketing.

The ServiceNow Prize is open to solutions that connect communities to develop, share and replicate best practices for carbon absorption and decarbonization, which is relevant to our solution that helps people to reduce carbon emission and support nature sustainability. We will also have a feature that gives a sense of community to our users by allowing them to interact. We will use the prize for software development, stakeholder engagement process, and marketing.