Ian Monroe

  • Oroeco

  • 2014 Climate Fellow

Ian Monroe
  • Oroeco

  • 2014 Climate Fellow

bold idea

Mitigate climate change with information technology and social accountability that informs and incentivizes everyone to scale personal actions into a societal shift.

organization overview

Oroeco’s mission is to stop climate change by scaling individual actions into societal solutions. Oroeco automatically tracks the climate impacts of your lifestyle and everywhere your money goes, then rewards you and your friends for improving. We link real-time financial data to life-cycle climate impacts of products, services, investments and lifestyle choices. Users can save money and carbon with personalized actions, offset impacts, compare to averages and Facebook friends, and collaborate and compete to earn rewards. Oroeco aims to reengineer the global economy for sustainability, empowering everyone with information and incentives that drive virtuous cycles of continuous improvement.

Personal Bio

Ian is the founding CEO of Oroeco, as well as a Lecturer at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on renewable energy and climate change decision-making. Ian grew up on a small farm in Northern California, raised by a single-mother with a passion for environmental education. After graduating with an MS in Earth Systems from Stanford, Ian worked on energy and climate projects around the world, collecting on-the-ground experience in over twenty countries. From melting glaciers and rising seas, to wildfires, hurricanes, and drought-prone subsistence farmers, these experiences highlighted the urgency of our climate crisis. Increasingly frustrated by the ineffectiveness of government, corporate and nonprofit approaches, Ian contemplated if information technology and behavioral psychology could solve climate change from the bottom up, harnessing our basic desire to do good when given the right incentives. These ideas coalesced into Oroeco, a rapidly growing web and mobile community that has won awards from the U.S. and Chilean governments, and been featured in media around the globe (including Forbes, Reuters, Discovery, Boston Globe and many more).