The Geneva-Tsinghua Initiative

Project: 2020 or Bust

Shifting climate change from being something big, complex, and inaccessible, to something simple and actionable.

“You have to do what no one else has done—make climate change and the ending of it go viral.”

Ending the climate crisis is the challenge of the 21st century. While there are many actions that are being taken and could be taken, there is very little work being done to track and manage the actions that MUST be taken to produce the specific, measurable result of ending the crisis.

How do we know if our actions are making a difference?

The 2020 or Bust app was specifically designed to track and manage measurable results toward ending the crisis. It challenges users to take ending climate change into their own hands, by giving them a choice of actions they can take to reduce their carbon usage.

Depending on the actions they select and their location, they are then given a 2020 carbon target to work toward. All the targets are aggregated into one global target so that people can see the direct connection between their daily actions and the progress of humanity in bridging the critical 2020 emission gap. Ending the climate crisis becomes a game that anyone can play and that, together as a global community, we can win!

The crucial next step for ending the climate crisis is to get diverse communities all over the world to take actions and track their results. Currently, the app has only one set of actions for everyone. While those actions make sense for adults in the USA, they are not well suited to the rest of the world. So for the app to be a helpful tool, the messages and actions need to be tailored and made relevant for more and different communities.

Leveraging the existing app, here some research and implementation challenges:

Actions - actions need to be relevant for different communities. Youth groups in Europe might need a different set of actions from high school students in China. Which communities should be targeted to make change go viral? Which are the right actions for them? What actions are fun and engaging?  
Images - which images will engage each community? What is exciting, rewarding, and culturally appropriate?
Science - For each action taken by the typical participant, how much carbon is saved annually?
Gamification - are competitions between the different organizations and communities a good option for engagement?
Language - All the information about the actions needs to be in the right language for the target community.

The 2020 or Bust campaign is officially supported by: