CarbonPals

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🌱 About the Project – CarbonPals

Climate change affects how cities grow, how infrastructure is planned, and how people live day to day. While many people want to reduce their carbon footprint, they often lack clear guidance on which actions matter most and how to turn awareness into consistent behavior. This gap between intention and action was the motivation behind CarbonPals.

CarbonPals is a social sustainability app that helps users reduce their carbon footprint through AI-generated daily challenges, habit streaks, and shared progress within communities. Rather than overwhelming users with complex data or long-term goals, the app focuses on small, realistic actions that can be integrated into everyday life. The goal is to make sustainability a daily practice instead of an abstract concept.

By encouraging sustainable transportation, energy use, and lifestyle choices, CarbonPals supports SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) by promoting behaviors that collectively improve urban sustainability, resilience, and environmental impact.

🧠 What We Learned

Through building CarbonPals, we learned that encouraging sustainable behavior is most effective when it is:

Personalized to the individual
Actionable, focusing on practical steps rather than theory
Social, so users feel motivated and accountable through shared progress

We also learned that AI can be especially powerful when used to guide behavior rather than simply provide information. Designing prompts that produced realistic, low-effort daily actions required careful iteration to ensure recommendations were clear, achievable, and meaningful in an urban, real-world context.

On the technical side, we gained experience designing a NoSQL data model capable of supporting social feeds, analytics dashboards, and daily task generation while remaining efficient and scalable for a hackathon environment.

🛠️ How We Built It

CarbonPals was built using modern web technologies, with a strong emphasis on Google’s ecosystem:

Next.js for the full-stack web application
Firebase Authentication for secure user accounts
Firestore as the primary NoSQL database for users, tasks, communities, and analytics
Firebase Storage for optional photo uploads when users complete tasks
Google Gemini, accessed through the OpenRouter API, to generate personalized sustainability challenges
Charting libraries to visualize individual and community impact over time

Core functionality includes:

A carbon footprint questionnaire to establish each user’s baseline impact
Daily AI-generated tasks tailored to the user’s lifestyle and estimated footprint
A streak system that encourages consistency and long-term habit formation
Friends and communities that promote collaboration and shared accountability
A public activity feed highlighting completed sustainability actions
Analytics dashboards showing progress, streaks, and carbon offset over time

All task completions are timestamped and stored chronologically, with pagination and limits in place to ensure efficient database usage.

🚧 Challenges We Faced

One major challenge was balancing accuracy with simplicity. Carbon reduction data can become complex quickly, so we focused on providing estimates that are informative and motivating without overwhelming users.

Another challenge was ensuring that daily tasks are generated only once per day per user while keeping the experience seamless across sessions and devices. We also had to carefully manage database reads and writes to support global feeds and community analytics without exceeding Firestore limits.

Integrating AI responsibly was another important consideration. We used strict schema validation and prompt constraints to ensure that generated tasks were realistic, safe, and aligned with sustainable urban living goals.

🌍 Final Thoughts

CarbonPals demonstrates how AI, habit-building, and social accountability can work together to support more sustainable cities and communities. By turning environmentally responsible behavior into a daily habit and making impact visible at both the individual and community level, CarbonPals aims to empower users to contribute to greener, more resilient urban environments over time.