VCP

Visible Carbon Project

“We will scientifically uncover why even people who have made climate their career

fail to act — and use that answer to redesign climate education and policy.”

Asan Nonprofit Startup Challenge Track Application

July – October 2026 (4 months)

01 Problem Definition

Many people know that the climate crisis is serious. So do those who majored in climate studies, work at environmental NGOs, and teach sustainable management. Yet their everyday carbon footprint differs little from that of the general public.

Failure of existing approaches: Providing more information, running stronger campaigns — neither has closed the gap between knowledge and action.

VCP’s perspective: Carbon does not feel like “my problem.” This is not a lack-of-information problem; it is a problem of psychological design.

02 Core Concept — Psychological Ownership

Behavioral change does not begin the moment a person learns information. It begins the moment they feel: “This is my problem, and I can change it.” This sense is called Psychological Ownership.

03 Core Hypotheses

Hypothesis 1 (July – August)

People who work in climate-related fields carry an internalized cognitive dissonance about carbon emissions. Real-time visualization intervention will surface this contradiction, rapidly generate psychological ownership, and produce meaningfully stronger behavioral change than that observed in general-interest participants.

Exploratory question: In some cases, cognitive dissonance may lead to an avoidance response. This experiment will explore where that branching point occurs.

Hypothesis 2 (September – October)

Focused intervention on the under-fulfilled ownership dimension will produce a meaningfully higher rate of behavioral change compared to Cycle 1.

04 Experimental Design

Daily Input Structure (Target: under 3 minutes/day)

Morning (1 min): Enter planned transport mode → estimated carbon displayed in advance.
Evening (2 min): One signal per domain (energy, diet, transport) → app infers the rest.
Weekly — Monday (2 min): Set carbon budget for the week.
Weekly — Sunday (3 min): Budget settlement + record turning points (what was easy / what was hard).

App Inference Engine

Participant input: Signal (More / Similar / Less + domain)
→ Baseline check (1-week measurement before experiment start)
→ Personalization coefficient applied (this participant’s “Less” = average −18%)
→ External variable correction (temperature, weather, time-of-day carbon intensity)
→ Carbon amount automatically inferred
→ Accuracy updated on bi-weekly deep-measurement days (target: 85–90%)

Feedback Structure

Basic: Translated into felt language — “Today you saved 0.3 pine trees.”
Cumulative: “So far: 12.4 pine trees / Goal: 20 trees (62%)”
Comparative: Yesterday / Personal best / Group average — all provided simultaneously.
Optional: (i) button → macro-level contextual information (not the default; whether clicked is experimental data).

07 Policy Pathways

Experimental data → Extract 3 design principles for psychological ownership-based carbon visualization.

[Short-term] Submit design improvement recommendations for the Carbon Neutrality Practice Points program feedback system (to Korea Environment Corporation).
[Mid-term] Insert ownership-based carbon measurement activities into school environmental education curricula (Ministry of Environment · Ministry of Education).
[Long-term] Propose a standard guideline for carbon labeling system design (Ministry of Environment · Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy).