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A carbon footprint is the impact on the climate as we go about our daily lives. It is the impact of the greenhouse gases emitted from each decision we make throughout the day – either directly or indirectly. It's a way of representing your personal contribution to the polluting gases that cause climate change.

From the type of car you drive, to the construction materials of your new wardrobe – it all leaves a footprint. You can find out more in our article explaining exactly what a carbon footprint is (opens in a new window).

You can view your monthly, calculated carbon footprint and your footprint's breakdown by categories so you can understand your environmental impact of every purchase you make. You can also see suggested changes you could make to reduce your footprint.

Yep – it’s 100% free to use.

A carbon footprint is measured in kilograms (kgs) of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Our Carbon Tracker does this by analysing your anonymised outgoing transactions and matching them to industries (fashion, grocery, etc.). Then each transaction is multiplied by an emissions factor per industry to calculate the carbon footprint of that purchase.

The emissions factors are lower for certain companies in an industry (e.g. renewable energy providers and second-hand clothing businesses) or due to dietary choices based on average grocery basket data from the Office of National Statistics (e.g. not eating red meat).

We need three bits of data to calculate your carbon footprint: transactions, business names and emissions factors (EFs).

Once we have sorted your spend into categories based on business names, the Carbon Tracker compares those categories against a comprehensive list of business types and their EFs.

An EF is the amount of CO2 produced by £1 of spend, for a particular type of business. For example, a trip to a supermarket will on average produce 1.01 KG of CO2e per £ spent (less if you're a vegetarian). Extensive research has been conducted to calculate EFs that are as accurate as possible.

Despite considerable effort, the EFs still only represent the average emissions per transaction. We constantly work to improve their accuracy, for example by allowing companies to provide their own verified data.

Your carbon footprint is calculated for the last rolling month based on the date you’ve chosen in your Spending settings. If you want to change your start date, go to Settings in the Spending tab, choose Set a date, and change the day.

To make it easier to visualise, 1kg of CO2 looks like:

• A large beach ball with a diameter of slightly over 1m (3 feet)
• Driving an average car 2.5 miles
• Using half a litre of petrol
• 128 smartphone charges

Your data is used to generate your carbon footprint; these results, are strictly used for the tracker only.

At this stage, we’re not able to reflect a reduction in your carbon footprint when you complete our recommended Actions – this is only because we can’t tell if you’ve done them or not. Even though we can’t do this, please know that any changes you make can still have a positive effect on the environment.

But, if your Actions involve not spending money on certain industries, then your calculation could reduce as it will pick up that you’ve stopped spending there.

The Carbon Footprint you see is for your last previous month, so if haven’t spent on your account in the last month your estimated footprint will be 0kgs of CO2. Transfers between accounts also won’t impact your Carbon Footprint at all.

No, our Carbon Footprint Tracker will only be available in your NatWest app.

We're sorry you don't want to track this anymore – you can opt out in the NatWest app by going to Spending > Settings > Manage My footprint > and slide the toggle left to opt-out.

Every change you make, no matter how small, adds up collectively and positively affects the environment. If all our customers made small climate positive change this could add up to make a big difference.

For ideas, look at the Actions section to see examples of how you could reduce your carbon footprint.

An average Carbon Footprint is around 1000kg of CO2 a month.

Cogo were founded with the aim of changing behaviours to better the world. NatWest has teamed up with them to help our customers understand the impact their spending has on the planet by calculating a carbon footprint for each transaction they make.

The aim is to show customers how to make positive changes to both their spending and lifestyle that could lower their carbon footprint and make a real and lasting impact for the biggest issue of our lifetime.

Our goal is to be a leading bank in addressing the climate crisis and lower our carbon footprint. We're working with Cogo, the experts in carbon footprint tracking, to do just that and help our customers easily reduce their footprints' too.

Yes – Cogo uses best practice security technology to ensure your data is safe. That data is anonymised, stored for no longer than a year and will never be shared with anybody other than us at NatWest for the purpose of the Carbon Footprint Tracker.

In short: we’re working to make our operations climate positive by 2025 and to at least halve the climate impact of our financing activity by 2030.

You can find more information about exactly what we’re doing and what our targets are in our climate strategy (opens in a new window).