Going Green - Space Apps Challenge

Going Green| 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?

Going Green – track and reduce your carbon footprint from the comfort of your smartphone

Summary

Going Green is an app with 2 sections: examination and data gathering. First, the app will ask questions about carbon footprints and their relevance to our daily activities. Then, the user will add basic information about their transportation methods, household lights and diet. The app will later proceed to explain how and where the 2 sensors should be implemented. After a day of data gathering, the app will state if the user’s carbon footprint is higher than average. If so, it would explain what a carbon footprint is and provide information on eco-friendly startups or tips to reduce GHGs emissions. Finally, the app would compare the change after the user applies our advice.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Since Going Green’s main objective is raising awareness about how our daily activities impact greenhouse gases emissions, its relevance with the challenge’s objective is explicit. If many users followed the guidelines of the app and used the multiple sensors correctly, we would incite a more knowledgeable community regarding environmental manners, making a long term impact in many people’s lifestyles. With the data gathered we also aim to show to which extent people know about their carbon footprints, making it clear for the international community that a more effective environmental education is needed. This can also help to implement international environmental policies to reduce the level of unawareness and encourage the usage of less carbon emitting activities.

Knowing about the problem is the first step to stop it, which is the reason why we strongly believe our project could be beneficial if implemented on a large scale.

How We Developed This Project

Climate change is such a prevalent issue in today’s world. Our team took on this challenge because we feel it is our responsibility to take care of our planet and preserve it for many generations to come. By informing and educating the public, we strongly believe that we can help make a difference in our environment. When approaching this problem, our team knew we would have to take an organized method to create effective solutions that are easy to implement. One of the biggest hurdles in tackling this project was coordinating different time zones as we navigated through this hackathon virtually from places across the globe. Our approach was simple yet effective, establish a plan, develop an idea, expand on those ideas, and divide the work equally amongst all team members while maintaining contact via Zoom. Our team utilized Figma, a prototyping tool in order to develop the mainframe of the app, which is vital in our plans to help reduce carbon footprints. Since this is only a prototype, we just designed the skeleton of the app. Notwithstanding, we are looking forward to making use of coding languages such as Arduino, JavaScript and Python in order to make the app and, through Bluetooth connection, make the project a dream come true. The biggest achievement we had was overcoming many obstacles in order to form our team and connect with international members, but the biggest achievement was establishing the definite plans for what we hope to be a solution to climate change and aid scientists in mapping more carbon sources and sinks.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

NASA’s data helped to influence all of the decisions we made to research and develop our solutions. Through NASA, our team was able to thoroughly understand the meaning of a carbon footprint and the consequences it has on our environment. Using data from NASA helped us to identify and determine the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions. This inspired us to focus on the certain main contributing factors to climate change, and helped us keep a narrower focus on our project. Using NASA data, especially the visuals of the methane movements, proved an invaluable resource for measuring how much greenhouse gasses impact the world at a large scale. This helped influence our project as we gained a broader understanding of greenhouse gas emissions and helped us develop ideas that were both realistic and feasible that could be used to help ensure that we lead more sustainable lives and our planet thrives for many generations to come.

On another note, we also used the data from Space Apps 2020 in the informational section of our app. In the case the user isn’t completely aware of what a carbon footprint is, at the end of the process the app would provide data from these sources so not only we are aware of these important facts, but also the international community.