Climate change would perhaps be the worst and most calamitous environmental disaster to ever threaten human existence, but it is not the only one. This fact has been understood in the past as well; instead, humanity already faces five of these nine possible doomsday catastrophes. With each line we cross, we jeopardize the planet's ability to self-regulate.

This concept of planetary boundaries is helpful for scientists but less helpful for anyone else. Trying to get your head around one existential crisis at a time is hard enough. Trying to navigate six others, from biodiversity loss to microplastics? Too much.

Not so fast, counters TechCrunch's Christophe Girardier. His Glimpact startup had just launched an app called MyGlimpact, which tries to help people calculate not just the scale of their impact on the environment but also tell them where they should not feel bad about this footprint.

"It's giving citizens a vision of the reality of the state of the environmental crisis, which is not only climate change, but which is systemic," Girardier said. "The real cause of the environmental crisis is partially citizens, but not entirely. The first responsibility falls on the state, the political decision-makers and the companies."

The free app does not require you to sign up to use it; it asks you about your lifestyle. From what you eat to how you commute, how you heat and cool your home, and how many clothes you buy in a year, the app asks everything. You have two choices: you can have a few vague questions in each category and let the app make certain assumptions, or you can have more specific questions that leave less to be assumed.
The MyGlimpact app then feeds this information through its cloud-based software that it's developed, which measures impact in 16 categories.

There, at the back end, it does essentially the same kind of number crunching that Glimpact performs for major corporations, who take the results and use them to finish environmental reports that are mandated by several governments and regulators. On the front end, the app simplifies those results for the layperson, who learns how many Earth-equivalents are needed to support their lifestyles. TechCrunch was granted an exclusive first look at the app before its launch Thursday.

If all of us lived like me, we would need the resources of 2.93 Earths, states the app. Maybe my footprint could be a bit smaller; the app didn't ask how much renewable power my household uses-we subscribe to a community solar plan. MyGlimpact offers suggestions of where folks can make tweaks that would reduce their footprints or maybe where they could try to persuade politicians to change things.

If anything, the app reinforced to me how much environmental impact is baked into the society and economy in which I live. Much of the past decade has been spent trying to make my lifestyle as environmentally friendly as possible. We drive electric vehicles, our commutes are virtually nonexistent, we take transit when possible, and we eat meat seldom. Our home's walls are thick and highly insulated, with heating and cooling being managed by a high-efficiency heat pump. And after all that, I've only just managed to squeak under three Earths.

The concept of an environmental footprint, and even better, a carbon footprint, is nothing new. MyGlimpact takes the concept and makes it personal. The app could be oriented to guide the user more in how to change lifestyles and how to implore politicians and corporations to do likewise. For a first version, though, it's a powerful tool for anyone hoping to understand their place in the world.