The production and distribution of food accounts for around a third of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions (排放). But as a consumer? It’s difficult to measure the climate impact of what you eat.

A Dublin-based startup called Evocco could soon make it much easier. It lets users track and improve the climate impact of your food purchases. Users simply photograph their grocery receipts using the Evocco app, which identifies the food products by reading the printed text and using machine learning. It then calculates the carbon footprint based on the store’s location and by checking the type, weight and origin o£ a food against a database. The database is maintained by Eaternity, a life cycle assessment company based in Switzerland. If the receipt doesn’t contain enough data on a product, it will give an estimate based on similar products and reference points.

The app is available for free on iOS and Android devices, which has been downloaded more than 1,000 times since its launch at the end of last year. As well as the personal shopping app — which Evocco hopes to launch in the United States by the end of this year — the company is developing a digital tool to sell to food storekeepers, e-commerce platforms and delivery apps that will track the climate impact of a product’s journey through the supply chain. The aim is to help storekeepers provide climate impact information directly to consumers, and more importantly, to give Evocco access to product data to improve its app.

The Evocco app is not the only app looking to reach this climate-conscious market. There’s Capture, which estimates monthly CO₂ emissions by asking users a series of questions on diet, transport and other factors, as well as Yayzy and My Carbon Action, which link to a user’s bank account, calculating their footprint from trade.

Electric cars are already greener than petrol cars in almost every part of the world today, according to researchers. They say electric vehicles are “a no-regret choice” even in places where power nets haven’t gone fully green.

Some previous comparisons suggested petrol cars produce lower net carbon emissions (净碳排放量) over their lifetime than battery- powered cars. Yet these analyses have often compared only two fixed models of cars.

Instead, the researchers from Radboud University looked at the average emissions across many classes of car to get a clearer global picture. It includes during its production, while it is being driven and when it is broken, for all the petrol and electric cars sold in 59 areas across the world in 2015. They connected with information of those areas in the following years and found that the electric vehicles are greener than the new petrol cars. Electric vehicles already have lower net carbon emissions in 53 of those 59 areas. Only in some countries that use coal heavily, such as India and Poland, are electric car emissions worse than those of petrol cars.

The researchers say that the differences between petrol and electric cars on the carbon emissions will grow bigger as power stations get greener. By 2030, they expect the carbon emissions of electric cars to be 20 percent lower than that in 2015, and 30 percent lower by 2050. The suggestions for governments are clear, says Knobloch.“There is no need to wait. Don’t be confused by all those different results out there. It’s a no-regret choice already.”

Perhaps the most common climatic effect of global warming is rapid extension of ice melt. Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa and the Himalayas will very likely lose most of their glacial ice within the next two decades, affecting local water resources. NASA scientists determined Greenland’s ice sheet is thinning by about 1m per year. The additional melt water, especially from continental ice masses and glaciers, is adding to a rise in sea level worldwide. Satellite remote sensing is monitoring global sea level, sea ice, and continental ice. Worldwide measurements confirm that sea level rose during the last century.

Okay, so how much is melting of Greenland contributing to sea level rise? Estimates are about 270 gigatons of water per year. The melting of an ice sheet can occur from the surface as air temperatures and sunlight warm the upper layer of ice. It can also occur from the edges as ice shelves collapse and fall into the oceans in large pieces. The bedrock underneath the ice sheet is not also flat. There are undulations that rise and fall and change the water-ice-ground connection, which can make it easier for ice to melt and can increase the rate of ice shelf collapse. So scientists have a real interest in learning about the land underneath ice sheets so that they can better predict ice collapse and sea level rise.

Greenland ice has its feature, meaning it acts slowly but once it gets going, it’s hard to stop. So predicting how fast this melt will take is interesting from a scientific advantage point but there are also enormous social and economic consequences. Right now, 150 million people live within 3 feet of today’s sea level. If you live near the coast, the question of “when” is really important. This suggests that “when” may be sooner than we hoped.