Conserve To Preserve - Space Apps Challenge

Conserve To Preserve| What Is Our Carbon Footprint?

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?

Conserve To Preserve - How can we combat global warming from an individual to a global scale?

Summary

A world uneducated is a world futile. The younger generation are the ones who are going to suffer the consequences of climate change; it is up to them to quickly become educated on these issues and restore the natural world in all its glory, for we must take care of our own home before exploring the cosmos above. To educate, to inform, is to ensure a future of free-thinkers capable of utilising their problem-solving skills by applying it to the world we leave them in charge. This game is an effort to educate the player not only of the flaws in their current lifestyle, but also on how they can conserve to preserve.

How We Addressed This Challenge

In this project of ours, we developed a game called “What is Your Carbon Footprint?” which provides an interactive way for people but especially the younger generation to learn about how the actions they take affect carbon emissions, and in turn climate change.

It quantifies the carbon footprints of these local-to-national activities through the ending which has statistics on what the world will look like if we continue on this trajectory of rising temperatures. Most importantly however, it makes the public aware of their individual carbon footprint relative to that of the average person in Hong Kong.

We also look to find local sources of emissions per capita through this project, and from slide 9-11 in our slideshow we address the sectors which contribute the most towards global warming in Hong Kong, give possible solutions to the largest contributor to global warming (which is also the largest sector globally, and can be adapted by every country’s government) and we also give additional projects our government can embark upon in order to combat this warming.

How We Developed This Project

Our group decided to choose this challenge as climate change is arguably the largest threat to our existence at the moment, and it's one that is universally applicable to everyone. Because of this, we feel it is important to educate the younger generation on the issue and provide them with the information they need to take steps towards solving this issue.

Our goal was to create an interactive game that will ensure that everyone understands the depth of their individual contributions to the advancement and acceleration of climate change. Although one may not always be thinking about the detrimental and global effects of their actions (such as turning on the air conditioner during winter, keeping the television on when they’re not using it, etc.), everyone's daily life and the choices they make in that life either helps or worsens the issue at hand. For people to be more aware of how damaging their daily habits could be to the environment, we created this game . "What is Your Carbon Footprint?" gives a rough estimate on the consequences the environment and humans themselves, especially those in underdeveloped nations, will have to face if everyone were to live YOUR life.

We used Pygame to develop this project. Pygame is an add-on to Python that uses a GUI which stands for graphical user interface. Our head programmer specializes in default Python programming, but default Python uses a CLI which is a command line interface, and GUI and CLI are completely different to one another as they have different purposes. GUI uses graphics as a basis while CLI uses commands as a basis for coding.

One of the problems our team had would be time management as there were many times when we were unable to properly estimate the time needed to develop certain stages of the project, which lead to us having to rush certain tasks. We also had a few issues with coding as none of our members have sufficient knowledge or experience with Pygame. Despite this, we completed a sufficient amount of research throughout the project, and at the end, we were able to produce our final game. An achievement would definitely be the way in which we compiled all our data in the slideshow, which we think was done proficiently with good attention to detail.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Here are two snippets from our slideshow that explains the thinking behind this entire project. This was where we compiled all the data we found, and it is also a process journal of sorts where we show the non-coding steps responsible for the making of this game. “Trace gases include water vapour, ozone and other various types of industrial gases such as CFCs. Water vapour is the largest GHG, and water vapour and the warming of the earth is directly related as is the possibility of clouds and precipitation.This explains the heavy rainfall that is tied to climate change. CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons, are synthetic

compounds produced solely by industrial activity that contributes to the destruction of the ozone

Layer.” Seeing as 65.6% of HK’s total carbon emissions came from electricity generation, the HK government must move towards cleaner energy for us to even have a chance of slowing down human-induced warming let alone ending it. Alternative energy sources (drastically reducing carbon emissions) are essential not only for HK, but for governments all around the world to switch to, so we can combat global warming together. This means that governments need to invest in and give subsidies to companies that provide cleaner and greener energy.”