It’s becoming more and more normal to live half your life in your phone, checking in and rating places. Ironically, this is an app that encourages you to “look, hear and breathe”: be present, and evaluate the quality of the environment around you. Don’t just rate what you buy, but also the quality of the place where you live.
The Envirate app builds on the PhD thesis of Pekka Harju-Autti on the subject of perceived state of the environment. It uses citizen science to crowd-source environmental information and applies algorithms to ensure consistency and internal and external validity of the data. Using the app, people can monitor the state of the environment in their immediate surroundings, supporting early warning and timely interventions to avoid environmental deterioration or even environmental disasters.
The app uses gamification to engage users, and motivates them to learn, actively make a change and safeguard the quality of their environment. It supports monitoring long-term environmental factors. It stimulates clean-up projects. It informs tourists on quality of the environment but also on events related to the environment in the area they visit.
Envirate has won the UNIVERSITY OF TURKU PENTTI MALASKA FUTURES AWARD 2017 and is currently participating in the Madeira Startup Retreat/Accelerator 2019 as one of 10 start-ups selected from 19 countries. Furthermore, Envirate is collaborating with Environment Online- a global network of schools and communities to support sustainable development in some 157 countries. The collaboration aims at planting trees worldwide-all tree locations will be registered in the Envirate solution and stored to blockchain.
