Designing new participation models for climate action through incentives, behavioural design, and product systems

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our time.

We know we need to reduce the emissions we produce, but we also know reduction alone won’t be enough. We also need to remove the excess legacy greenhouse gases already in our atmosphere. The technologies exist. The challenge is creating enough demand to help them scale.

Glad grew from that idea.

Together with my co-founder, Ben Wynn, we’ve been exploring whether everything we’d learnt building digital products could help more people take part in funding carbon removal. Not because we think it’s the whole answer, but because we believe there’s a large group of people who want to help if only there was an easy enough way to play their part.

As a founder, I’ve been involved in every part of the journey: testing ideas with customers, refining the model, speaking with potential partners and investors, creating content, building an audience and, more often than not, learning from things that didn’t work.

We’ve helped fund the removal of more than 60,000kg of greenhouse gases. It’s a drop in the ocean compared to the scale of the problem, but it’s more than there would have been otherwise.

Glad is still very much a work in progress.

The product has evolved several times already. What we’re still trying to crack is finding a repeatable way of reaching the people who want to do something.

Wondering how this fits with the rest of my work?

Although the domain is very different, many of the ideas behind Glad are the same ones that have shaped the rest of my career. They also underpin how I approach product.