Environmental issues and impacts made easy-to-understand, backed by in-depth research and facts.

We read research papers so you don't have to.

Despite there being a significant will in people to make their lifestyles more environment-friendly, there is a severe dearth of usable knowledge. The availability of eco-alternatives is often made murky with insincere PR efforts by consumer brands. Consumers tend to evaluate the concept of eco-friendliness with a narrow lens, and if not backed by knowledge this can actually be worse for the planet.

An example: there is a huge push to stop using single-use plastic bags and shift to cloth bags instead. As per a study conducted by UK's Environment Agency to determine the ecological footprint of a plastic bags vs paper bag vs cloth bag, concluded that a cotton bag would have to be reused 131 times to break even with a plastic bag, in terms of the climate impact of producing each bag, thus showing that the issue is not as simple as it is often made out to be. (Read more here).

We are building a knowledge-base to encourage and enable environment-related consumer and individual action. Our effort is threefold:

Make information about environmental issues more friendly, robust and accurate by supporting it with scientific research.
Evaluate lifestyle products and services that claim to be eco-friendly and remove greenwashers from genuine ones.
Bring about a behavioural change in consumption patterns, by looking into the history of consumerism and questioning the necessity of material we own.

Visible Cities is currently operated by a single person, along with guidance and advice from well-meaning friends and family. With your help and support, we can scale this effort at creating meaningful knowledge for everyone. For that, we need more researchers in the team to liaison with academia and scientists & writers that can comprehend and decode scientific data into easy-to-understand content.

We would much appreciate any support that you can give in our effort to aid the solution for climate crisis from the bottom up.