Atmo-Defenders| What Is Our Carbon Footprint?

Awards & Nominations

Atmo-Defenders has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

What Is Our Carbon Footprint?

Your challenge is to identify local sources of carbon emissions and/or estimate amounts of carbon emissions for different human activities to aid scientists in mapping carbon sources and sinks. How can you inform decisions to adapt to the consequences of a changing world and aid policy makers in making plans for the future?

What is Our Carbon Footprint? An AWARENESS VIDEO CAMPAIGN AND VIDEO!

Summary

We made awareness video for social media campaign. We were able to ask the opinion of some people regarding carbon footprint, as we anticipated 85% people were unenlightened about this term and for those who knew had a vague understanding and were not aware of the consequences of the action which led them to escalate the carbon footprint.In a developing country like Pakistan, the majority only care about the advancements and developments and are ignorant about the consequences they have on the atmosphere. Due to which we made an awareness video and our goal is to spread the word across Pakistan via social media sites i.e. facebook, instagram, whatsapp etc.

How We Addressed This Challenge

According to WHO, a carbon footprint is a measure of the impact your activities have on the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced through the burning of fossil fuels and is expressed as a weight of CO2 emissions produced in tonnes.

CO2 emissions (metric tons per capita) in Pakistan was reported at 0.98783 metric tons in 2016, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources Trading economics.

As people are unaware of this thing, our focus is to INFORM and AWARE.

Here are the links of our platforms on which we shared the video:

How We Developed This Project

We took interviews of the people around us. We reached out the AD of German Red Cross in Pakistan and in our video we worked on the following things:

Our video comprises of following parts;

  1. Public opinion on carbon footprint.
  2. Gathered information from NASA’s platform and made an animation video with the collaboration of an animation studio, which will be posted on their page for awareness.
  3. Expert opinion on the work that has been done regarding carbon footprint in Pakistan.
  4. Viewpoint of some influencers as they can be beneficial for influencing a large amount of people


Effects of carbon footprint

Carbon footprint is the primary event associated with climate change that is leading to global warming. Carbon footprint is having an extreme effect on the environment, as the temperature of our planet is rising the sea level is rising as well which can lead in the destruction of the entire ecosystem. It is having a profound effect on wildlife. If climate change will increase at the current rate many species will be headed towards extinction soon. It directly affects human health, as increase in air pollution and smog has caused the increase in more allergies and respiratory diseases such as asthma. It is also having a significant effect on the economy. As we discussed above that it is affecting the wildlife and ecosystem, Reduced per-capita economic productivity because of climate change is projected to be the fundamental negative socio economic climate–carbon feedback.


Ways to reduce carbon footprint


 Once people understand what effect carbon footprint is having on our planet they want to play their part in reducing it. One can easily do so on an individual level by minimizing the energy they are wasting i.e. shutting the lights off, AC and other electrical appliances while no one is in the room. Switching to energy efficient bulbs. Shorten your showers and close the tap while brushing (Do not waste water). Make use of reusable bags. Prefer walking or cycling over car journey if possible. Recycle organic waste. While buying choose products with less or no packaging at all.  Refuse what you don’t need, reduce what you need.


Our aim for making this awareness video and posting it on social media is to make people aware about what carbon footprint is and what part they can play to reduce it and save the planet.

The aim of the survey we did was to analysis how many people were aware of carbon footprint and what part they were playing in increasing or reducing it. This questionnaire was filled by the privileged people who are able to get a higher education. As a result 50% of people were clueless when they were asked about carbon footprint and 50% only had a vague idea about it but still they did not know how they were playing part in increasing the carbon footprint. We also questioned about how many people were using private transports and as expected almost 80% people were using private transport having no clue about its adverse effect on the planet. We also requested information about how much preferred meat of vegetables and we came up with almost 70% people who preferred meat. Not many people knew how their actions were harmful to the environment and only 13% of people accepted that they did believe their actions were harmful. When it came to taking steps towards minimizing the carbon footprint and in reversing climate change 95.2% people were willing to take action.

 


How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

I attended the session with Mr. Matt and my local leads. They guided me about what can we do as a Media Student. Also, I used the data of the website to complete my project on time.

Project Demo
Data & Resources

We took some data by creating google forms as it was a requirement. and rest we used this website and information from the AD of German Red Cross.

Tags
#takeaction #teamatmodefenders #EarthisourHome #ActNow #ClimateAction #NASASpaceAppChallenge (Instagram, Twitter and Facebook)
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.