Exogalactik | What Is Our Carbon Footprint?
What Is Our Carbon Footprint?
EJEKA
Summary
Ejeka managed to solve the problem by creating conciousness of it. We developed a mobile application with the main purpose of informing the user what is a carbon footprint, which are the effects of carbon emissions and how can we battle air pollution.Our application allows the user to calculate its C02 emissions, to identify its community´s air quality and to be aware of the individual actions it can take against air pollution.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Our solution is a mobile App for raising awareness of air pollution. Our interactive interface helps the users to easily identify the quality of the air on a determined location, their carbon emissions and the actions they can take in order to eradicate air polliution, therefore, improving the air quality of their community.
Our application has 3 main functions.The first one consists on calculating the amount of carbon emissions depending on the user´s daily activities. We will test many critical factors such as the number of vehicles the user owns, the amount of electrectrodomestic devices in its home and its meat consumption.
The second fuction uses satellital data and databases in order to detect the carbon levels and air quality of a determined region of the user´s election.
The third function allows the app to give recommendations to the user in order to reduce its carbon footprint. We will recommend the user the appropiate kind of tree to plant according to its location so that it doesn´t affect local flora and fauna, the amout of oxygen it needs to produce in order to reduce pollution on its area and some actions it could take in order to reduce its carbon footprint. We intend to reward the user when planting trees, we will give them small recognisements such as new avatars and animations in the app, a non official diploma for every 10 trees planted and in a near future, we want to make alliances with companies in order to offer them tax reduction in exchange of discounts for our users.
The main purpose of this project is to generate conciousness in the user through relevant and interesting information about carbon emissions and how to decrease them.
The relevance of our application relies on the urgent need of raising awareness on the fact that the world is at a serious risk due to climate change and so we are. We need to show people that there are still actions to be taken in order to save our planet, that pollution is not something distant, that it involves them and sodoes the change we´re desperately pursuing.
How We Developed This Project
We choose this challenge because we care about our planet. Nowadays it seems that people don't care about the environment anymore and It's really sad how polluted and mistreated our world is.
For example, last year in the state of San Luis Potosí (located in Mexico) there was a forest fire in the Mountain range of San Miguelito that damaged most of its fauna and flora, this was devastating and even though we "helped" it was not very helpful. Since many people (with good intentions) planted trees that were not from the region just to "reforest" therefore since we weren’t able to do much that time we would like to do something about this, that’s why “What is our Carbon footprint?” it’s the perfect challenge for us.
Our approach was to create community-awareness of an issue (CO2 emissions) that is believed to be the consequence of other factors such as big industries or the government, redirecting their perspective towards a more sustainable and eco-friendly lifestyle.
We developed an app called “Ejeka” which was programmed in Java, the app design and logo was made in Canva.
Overall, everything was fine, we had no problems. Instead we achieve good communication and a pleasant preview of our app.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
To answer this we need to understand the logical process for our solution. NASA's database is huge, constant, and extremely reliable. Pretty much the characteristics of a cornerstone if you ask me. For example we will use the data from the OCO-2 satellite, specifically from the XCO2 data. This will show us the atmospheric values for CO2 over a really specific spot, nonetheless CO2 gas is not the only we're tracking. Atmospheric contamination factors variables, such as a wide variety of aerosols, methane, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide.
All this data is useless without any problem solving done on it though, so we are going to periodically download the figures into our database so we have them all compiled into one place. This will also allow us to highlight the data from the regions we are interested in, making the process, quicker, more efficient, and more focused. By building our data base around specific regions we can implement our plan and measures according to each region's needs.
It's well known that most of the community’s carbon footprint comes from transportation, housing and food.
Our considerations rely on creating an efficient and more approachable map of our community, by using a constant app which allows us to increase awareness into our nearest area.
Through our exploration, every civilian will be able to recognize its contribution to an international problem, which will be easier to assimilate due to our friendly and understandable test.
Project Demo
Please go to the following links:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GwyvJLh8bpH9cslWSiy2AlfHTfLrhiU3TGftr_mtHNM/edit?usp=sharing
Data & Resources
Earthdata. (2020, 5 octubre). EarthData. https://earthdata.nasa.gov/
https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
https://www.nytimes.com/guides/year-of-living-better/how-to-reduce-your-carbon-footprint