In October 2020, some of us, working as researchers or student assistants at the geography department of Heidelberg University, formed an internal sustainability group. In order to create synergies we joined forces with Scientists4Future (S4F)Heidelberg. As we were concerned by a paper by Jahnke et al. (2020) showing that CO2e-footprints per researcher can be three times higher than the German climate target for 2030, we handed in a project idea to measure and reduce CO2e-emissions for working groups at the "The Climate Challenge Hackathon" of S4F Heidelberg and Goethe Institute - Pledge4Future was born. We won the hackathon, got funded by Goethe Institute, and since then, we have been developing our tool.

We know the manifold impacts of climate change on physical, biological and human systems. Among others, climate change leads to mass extinction, to displacement, to the potentially irreversible destruction of physical systems we all depend on.

We want to contribute to fight this crisis. We believe that humankind is able to stop climate change. This means that we urgently have to become climate-neutral in every area of life.

With our work and actions we want to deliver solutions instead of contributing to global warming. However, in research, greenhouse gas emissions are still excessively high. But how high are the emissions of your working group? And where are the highest potentials to reduce them? Answers to these questions are essential to support effective mitigation decisions and policies. This is why we are developing this tool to enable working groups around the globe to easily compute and on the long term reduce their emissions.

Many people want to protect our climate. However, it can be difficult to start significant transformations alone - in everyday-life, in politics, in our working environment. We believe that we have to create synergies and collaborate when it comes to challenges of the magnitude of climate change. Therefore, we created this platform to

1) enable all kinds of working groups to reliably compute and reduce their carbon footprints,
2) approach this challenge as a community and,
3) tackle it by means of scientifically sound methods.

Our logo symbolizes our goal. It embodies a compass that can point to different colors, symbolizing the different climate scenarios that we could reach tomorrow, based on the actions that we take today. The needle in the middle indicates to the light blue - a scenario without catastrophic climatic changes. You can also see four magnifying glasses representing the scientific and collaborative approach of our project. We all have to examine our own footprints and altogether take action to solve this global crisis.