WTcF - Space Apps Challenge

WTcF| 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?

What is in a footprint?

Summary

We are working on creating a visualization tool in the form of a website which identifies and describes the trends of how local sources in cities contribute to our nation's GHGs emissions, further impacting the global pollution index. In the website, we are also trying to enlighten the people how they individually contribute to the increase of the GHGs emission and what effective measures can be taken to mitigate it.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our website aims to identify local sources of GHGs emissions while trying to amalgamate all of the sources of information available on individual source polluters and the collective global emissions. Our mission is to convert the available data into valuable information for the users in a simplified way to make them more conscious of their local emissions in the fight to curb our carbon footprints. Further we want to make our platform as interactive and immersive as possible by introducing a chatbot and a basic game so that the user finds it easier to traverse through the city's map to locate the possible sources of GHGs. Taking inspiration from the local GHG emission source sectors of Japan (a resource provided under JAXA RESOURCES EXCERPTED FROM HTTP://EARTH.JAXA.JP/EN/), we want to mark the individual sectors (e.g. agriculture, industries, transport) on our city's map to further locate the local sources in a refined way.

How We Developed This Project

We tried using a basic website builder platform to build an interactive website. Our approach was to pick the simplest tool (website) to present complex information and we want to further work on the extremely technical O-CO2 observations using the visualization tools from python libraries and plotting them on a map. We also plan to use a user-friendly slider timeline to see the annual emissions over a city. For an easier rendering of the map, we are planning on integrating gmaps APIs with the open data sets on the various industries of India and using markers to identify individual sources of polluters.

Our group is highly diverse with all four of us belonging to different fields of STEM and living in different cities in India. Our biggest achievements were:

Working in unity to come up with a tangible solution to the challenge despite having different and varying work schedules.
Learning the technical skills needed to understand the data and building a website. None of us are adept in the technical knowledge needed to complete the project, but we are continuing to learn new things everyday to come up with more precise and unique ways to deal with the challenge.

Our biggest challenge is:

To understand and interpret the datasets provided under the resources of this challenge and acquire all the technical skills needed to create a functioning visualization tool.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

With JAXA and the open datasets like the power plants dataset of India, we were able to display the graphs of GHGs and source polluters in the coal and electric power industry. We were also able to integrate carbon footprint calculators. We have only managed to list the sources as of now, but we plan on integrating this knowledge with the concerned city's map to make it more visually appealing and interactive through a basic game that helps the user traverse through the city's map. We are also working on consolidating the OCO2 observations in the website. The basic game could be anything like a snake game to traverse through the city's map, or a game based on "the user's choices" where the user's everyday choices determine how much individual carbon footprint is produced, or a point and click game where the user is given a task to design a city based on UN's sustainable development guidelines to minimize the carbon footprint.