Carbon footprint
In the near future it’s likely we will be as aware of our carbon usage  as we are of personal financial budgets. If we are to respond  to global warming  we will need credible calculators of our carbon footprint. AMEE (Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine) was launched in 2005 and has fast become a trusted collector and calculator of carbon data. Its clients include the UK Government, the Irish Government, Google, Sun Microsystems and the rock band Radiohead.

Chief Executive Gavin Starks explains, ‘We started in 2005. I had been working with a number of different climate change charities, and looking at the carbon calculation space it seemed less than ideal. My background is a mixture of astrophysics, internet and business and we started to build a platform to pull together all the carbon data in the world.’

Common platform
Websites can sign up to AMEE and use their software on their site. AMEE provides the ‘back-end’ solution to websites who are looking to provide answers to carbon data questions from their visitors. ‘We are trying to pull together all the methodologies and emissions factors and other environmental items into a common platform,’ says Starks, ‘and make that available to other people who are interested in using it.’

AMEE contains a variety of different methods which are used to calculate carbon usage. Starks explains, ‘We act as a “data warehouse” so you can throw in all the data, all the number of kilowatt hours or the parameters of what you want to measure. We support many different methodologies regarding the actual calculation so you can choose which factors or which methodologies you want to use for analysing a piece of data.’

Car manufacturers
As more organisations use the facility of AMEE to measure their carbon consumption the company has grown from the three founders to fifteen employees and is now a full time project for Starks. What is interesting is that in the UK and the US it is the law that car manufacturers have to release CO2 data, so we represent those data sets. We are finding that other manufacturers are starting to say “Yes, we’ve got data,” and have started to publish it on AMEE so other people can access it.” Calculating carbon data is entering the mainstream.