Carbon Deleters| What Is Our Carbon Footprint?
Awards & Nominations
Carbon Deleters has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
What Is Our Carbon Footprint?
Carbon Footprint Calculation and Infos
Summary
Carbon emissions are the leading cause of ozone layer depletion and it contributes to Green House Effects. A carbon footprint is the total greenhouse gas emissions caused by an individual, households, institutions, manufacturing industries, expressed as carbon dioxide equivalent. Only one person cannot resolve this problem. So,our project focuses mainly to create a platform which informs people about the carbon they emit and help them to reduce it for the sake of our planet. We have intended to create a user friendly web application that calculates, informs and warns users/audience about the carbon emissions and ultimately reduce carbon footprint.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Background
When we talk about carbon emissions, we’re focusing specifically on carbon dioxide, or CO2. Naturally, CO2 releases into the atmosphere in a ton of ways. The largest source of natural carbon emissions is from the exchange of carbon dioxide between the oceans and the atmosphere. Animals and plants also emit CO2 through the process of respiration (breathe in oxygen, breathe out CO2). And, when these plants and animals decompose, organisms within the soil respire to produce energy and emit more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Nature, as nature tends to do, keeps most of these emissions in balance. Plants absorb CO2 through photosynthesis, and oceans absorb just about as much carbon dioxide as they let off. Carbon cycles through our air, water, and soil in a continuous process that supports life on earth.
Humans don’t play by the same rules that nature does. When we extract, refine, transport, and burn fossil fuels like coal, natural gas, and oil, we release extra carbon and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. We also cut down large expanses of CO2-absorbing trees to make way for agriculture and new developments, or collect lumber to create new products. When these trees burn or decompose, they emit even more CO2. By removing forests, we also effectively remove the natural systems that absorb and store carbon. When we add additional CO2 to the mix, nature can’t always pick up the slack.
How We Developed This Project
First of all while we signed up for this challenge, we were still searching for group members. After forming the team we conducted a discussion session where we decided to work on the topic "What is our Carbon Footprint ?” During the early days of the pandemic, there were news circulated on the internet and television about the environment getting cleaner day by day, some news said sulfur dioxide levels were rising in China. This news gave us the motivation to find out more about our environment, how it is healing itself, and what are the harmful elements that are degrading our earth. Then, we started looking at different projects related to this topic on the web and conducted brainstorming sessions where we decided to create a footprint calculator and information web application. After the research we conducted we found out that there is no such website which could be used to calculate the carbon footprint for Nepali people, also there was no such website which provided the information in the Nepali language to the people here in our place. Although English is a global language the people working in the factories here in the country may have problems understanding the news about the topic. So, we thought why not create an application which could be useful for these people. We created a web application in the Visual Studio IDE using HTML, CSS, Javascript languages.
While we were creating the application, we tried to find maximum information related to Carbon emissions in factories and industries in Nepal but we were unable to find out. The datas which we found were only of the country as a whole and the datas were also not in the current time. So, it was a bit difficult to use the real time data on our project.
On completing this project we have found out about the sources which are responsible for carbon emissions, what are the things which should be reduced and reused inorder to reduce the carbon emission, what are the steps carried out by the different organizations in the field of climate change. We are also delighted to know about the steps being taken by the various countries in order to reduce the carbon emissions.
We also found out about different trends of carbon emissions throughout the years around the world and Nepal. Furthermore, we were delighted to enhance our programming, researching knowledge by taking part in this challenge. We are also thankful for this competition which gave us an opportunity to work as a team in this time.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
For our project we have to go through the open source data available for or project challenge "What Is Your carbon Footprint?" and then develop our product. We used the data from https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions'%20[Online%20Resource] a NASA open source data .
To make it entertaining and knowledgeable we have integrated a quiz link about carbon foot print from https://climate.nasa.gov/quizzes/carbon-quiz/?fbclid=IwAR2dgIDLIQDKbqeLGCDvuq389qjTr2QJ7GGtIDbtI1AFf0sHuZiWbLJuHXQ
From the GMAO using Assimilated OCO-2 Data we have a video link on our web app
Project Demo
Data & Resources
Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2017) - "CO₂ and Greenhouse Gas Emissions". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions' [Online Resource]