💻 Ecosia's new function can show if companies are "greenwashers"

The non-profit browser Ecosio, has added a new feature which will help its users understand if major companies actually go through with their promises towards the climate or if they simply are greenwashers. Ecosia will put this rating next to some of the companies most frequently searched like for example, Meta, Spotify and Amazon.

How does this work? The ratings look at the climate commitments of each organization and compare it to the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal set by the IPCC  (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Ecosia hopes this added feature can help users get a clearer insight into how and what individual companies are doing to combat climate change. So, when users search for a big company, the climate pledge rating will appear. By adding this new feature, Ecosioa aims to make climate commitments more transparent for users.

“Global companies know they must publish regular sustainability reports and updates, but so often the reality of their impact is wrapped up in jargon, or hidden entirely,” says Michael Metcalf, Ecosia’s Chief Product Officer to Euronews.green and adds that this feature will help highlight any greenwashing statements.

Ecosia teamed up with Technische Universität (TU), located in Berlin to create the rating system. The system uses machine learning to analyze the ecological and social sustainability of companies. Also, open climate commitments of each business like for example pledges or sustainability reports are taken into account.

According to Euronews.green, the scale on which companies can get ratings range from A to F, where A identifies companies that demonstrate year-on-year reductions in their overall emissions and ambitious climate pledges. F is for businesses that aren’t making progress towards their climate targets and do not have any publicly available information or are actively misleading the public. This tool will reevaluate climate pledges frequently so the ratings will stay up to date.