About Adam Hardy

Digital toolmaker and website builder for small businesses and social enterprises, working from North London. Twenty years as a software engineer in finance and payments, then five years founding and running a community carbon footprint charity, which is an unusual pairing and the reason carbon methodology and the system to track it can be handled in one conversation.

What I build

Websites, and the systems an organisation actually runs on: contact lists, task boards, dashboards, data collection, and the custom tool nobody else quite makes because your organisation is the only one shaped like it. Alongside that, carbon accounting and net zero roadmapping, project management, and the technical sections of grant applications.

Custom tools are built with AI as the construction method, which is what makes small projects affordable that were not worth commissioning two years ago. The judgement about what to build, and how it should be structured so it survives, is the part that still takes twenty years of practice.

Twenty years of software engineering

Enterprise software in finance, payments and energy. Several years writing trading systems for BP's energy desk; lead developer at UBS on the bank's most-used access management platform, mentoring teams in Switzerland and India; structured products pricing at BNP Paribas; work on BACS, the payments system behind UK direct debits; credit card transaction platforms at Fidelity National Information Services and Nomad Software; trading algorithms, risk analysis and predictive modelling for foreign exchange and futures systems.

That background is where the standards come from: the kind of software that has to be right, rather than the kind that is allowed to be roughly right. It also explains the interest in data that has to survive a decade and still be comparable.

Five years of climate work

I founded EcoCounts in 2021 and ran it for five years: a registered charity in North and Central London promoting personal and group carbon accountability. It reached around £25,000 in grant funding including National Lottery support, a volunteer team of roughly 25, partnerships with St Luke's West Holloway and the Islington Climate Centre, and an academic partnership with UCL. In 2025 the participating group recorded a mean footprint of 5,171 kg CO2e against a London average of 6,890 kg, around 25% lower, with home energy 30% lower (2025 impact report). The members took the charity over from March 2026 and I am now its Founder and Lead Volunteer.

I built the measurement behind all of that: a longitudinal collection system that tracked participating households month after month, starting in a spreadsheet, which is still in real use.

I am also Director of EcoCore CIC, a carbon policy organisation advocating Carbon Accounts: a carbon currency of tradable allowances, in which national carbon budgets are minted by central banks at one token per kilogram of CO2 and every person and business holds an account. Professor Steve Keen is its Non-Executive Director, and the two of us arrived at the concept independently before the company existed. Dr Tina Fawcett of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford has called it "radical, equitable and effective". The manifesto has been downloaded around a thousand times, and the work has produced a BBC article, an ABC News podcast, and talks including London Futurists.

Why the combination matters

Carbon consultants recommend systems. Software developers build systems without knowing what a defensible emissions figure looks like. Doing both means the methodology and the tool that records it are decided together, by one person, which removes the handover where most of the cost and nearly all of the misunderstanding usually appears.

The written-up version of the questions clients ask most often is on the answers list.

Qualifications and certifications

• MSc Environmental Technology, Imperial College London
• BSc Zoology, University College London
• Carbon Literacy certified
• Climate Fresk facilitator
• PSM1 Professional Scrum Master
• Sun Certified Java Programmer

Practicalities

Based in North London, working with clients wherever they are, remotely or on site. Bilingual in English and German. Featured in Islington Faces, February 2023.

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