Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations
The Last Demand
Summary
As Voltran team, we are aware of environmental awareness is gradually decreasing and the world is rapidly moving towards the expected doomsday scenario. With The Last Demand project, we have designed a platform where old people can transfer their experiences to young people, so that we can touch the lives of both old and young individuals. We aim to leave a sustainable world to future generations by instilling awareness of nature with the platform. Our project is a WEB-based platform and it will be an application where videos, photos and current natural events will be shared. The social aspect of our project is both to make older people understand and want to benefit from their experiences.
How We Addressed This Challenge
We aim to overcome the mistakes that made against the ecological footprint in the past with our social awareness platform "The Last Demand" , so that the future generations will not make the same mistakes. We have developed a platform which increases web-based ecological footprint awareness against the identified challenge. The Ecological Footprint is a key sustainability indicator that use to measure human impact on ecosystems on the planet. In other words, it
is the biologically fertile land and water area needed to produce the resources consumed by an individual, community, or activity with current technology and resource management and to dispose of the waste it creates. The ecological footprint is expressed by” global hectare " (khaThis includes infrastructure and areas that are necessary for vegetation that will allow the absorption of waste carbon dioxide (CO2). By comparing the Ecological Footprint resulting from human activities with the amount of natural resources that we can produce in the same period, that is, with biological capacity, we can see whether we live within the limits of natural resources self-renewal. Every day, our world is losing its habitability due to the ecological footprint left by humanity. Our project works with short-answer questions that is carried out through our web-based platform. After solving the test, the user will encounter a result in which we will show what is good and what is bad in terms of their ecological footprint, according to their answers. These results will be given by self-criticism of elder individuals who are responsible for the current situation of the world and who have experienced the mistakes that have been made. This will also allow both older people and young people to empathize, which will lead to more effective results. A system based on social and emotional learning acts as a preliminary test in a sense. After 1 year , it is believed that the improvements will be made in terms of leaving an ecological footprint with the latest test for people who register on our website.
How We Developed This Project
The Voltran team consists of a science teacher, a math teacher, an information technology teacher, an English teacher and an electrical and electrical engineer. When you look at the branches, it is seen that this team can do interdisciplinary studies in the field of STEM. We are a group that try to find solutions to the problems which our world is facing. Each of us takes part in different social responsibility activities in our normal lives. In choosing this challenge, we also aimed to contribute to a more livable world.
In India,a man called Jadav “Molai” Payeng grew an entire forest with his own hands, without getting any help from anyone. If we can reach even one person with our inspiration, that person knows that maybe he/she can be the savior of the entire world's ecosystem. While developing our project, we know that there is no going back to the mistakes that we made against nature in the past, but our goal is to make the future world more livable by creating this consciousness for future generations. While doing this, to ensure an intergenerational cooperation. By interacting with Generation X and Generation Z, so that they can both socialize (which is a serious problem today) and contribute to the solution together. As we mentioned before, we handled (made up) this project with an interdisciplinary approach and Challenge Based Learning. In other words, we have created a technology-supported solution to the real world problem. While doing this , we received help from website creation services because of lack of time. In the later stages, we will use a more sustainable structure. We were able to reach a mass of 150 people in 2 days through the landing page of our project, which we set out by referencing the sustainability problem of the world. We collected a range of data from them and gave feedback on their ecological footprints. We designed the images that we use with Adobe Illustrator. We also wanted it to be a user-friendly design, and we ran the design-oriented thinking steps to work. The feedback that we receive is our website is useful and effective. Of course, we will continue to improve.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We have included data and resources provided by NASA, JAXA and CSA in our project by taking them from websites via remote access. The fact that the results we received were in parallel with the targeted results of the project motivated us more for the effectiveness and applicability of the project. In addition, the suitability of the study to be developed for the scientific infrastructure and the reliability and validity of the study were supported. For a sustainable world that will be passed on to future generations, graphs of daily partial carbon dioxide emissions from JAXA are embodied to what extent it can predict its ecological footprint and what needs to be done for subsequent generations. With the satellite images of CSA, it has been learned about how Canada uses its land and seas. Data from NASA shows that industrial activity has increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 280 parts per million to 414 parts per million over the past 150 years. This can be seen as the reason why the natural resource that should be consumed in 12 months as a result of the increasing population is consumed in 8 months.
We also benefited from Nasa data in creating an ecological footprint. JSC Sustainability Newsletter Spetember 2019 issue has helped us with this. . Especially, the relevant data has guided us in creating our justification. In these days, when data-based decision-making processes are often discussed, we also aim to contribute to scientific knowledge with this study. You can see the data used in the references section.
You can visit our demo through this link :
https://bobgaming18.wixsite.com/voltran
Project Demo
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p4sUWSWRhTpug7M4J3PSt7kBJk4Zf2ld/view?usp=sharing
Project Code
Data & Resources
Boğaziçi University. (n.d.). Ekolojik Ayak İzi Nedir?. Retrieved October 4, 2020, from http://climatechange.boun.edu.tr/ekolojik-ayak-izi-nedir/
CSA. (n.d.). Measuring atmospheric pollutants. Retrieved October 2, 2020, from https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/satellites/mopitt.asp
CSA. (n.d.). RADARSAT Constellation Mission sample image products. Retrieved October 3, 2020, from https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/open-data/access-the-data.asp#atmospheric
Earth Overshoot Day. (n.d.). What is the Ecological Footprint?. Retrieved October 2, 2020, from https://www.overshootday.org/kids-and-teachers-corner/what-is-an-ecological-footprint/
Ecological Footprint. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved October 3, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint
Global Footprint Network. (n.d.). What is your ecological footprint?. Retrieved October 3, 2020, from https://www.footprintcalculator.org/
JAXA.(n.d.). GOSAT/GOSAT-2 EORC Daily Partial Column GHGs. Retrieved October 2, 2020, from https://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/GOSAT/GPCG/index_GOSAT2.html
NASA. (n.d.). The Role of Human Activity. Retrieved October 3, 2020, from https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
NASA. (2019). JSC Sustainability Newsletter Sempember 2019. Retrieved from: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/sept_2019_sustainability_opportunities.pdf
Republic of Turkey Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. (2020). Retrieved fromhttps://arastirma.tarimorman.gov.tr/tepge/Belgeler/PDF%20Tar%C4%B1m%20%C3%9Cr%C3%BCnleri%20Piyasalar%C4%B1/2020-Ocak%20Tar%C4%B1m%20%C3%9Cr%C3%BCnleri%20Raporu/Dana%20Eti%20Tar%C4%B1m%20%C3%9Cr%C3%BCnleri%20Piyasa%20Raporu%202020%20ocak.pdf
Web Resource (2012). Türkiye’nin ekolojik ayak izi raporu. Retrieved from https://www.footprintnetwork.org/content/images/article_uploads/Turkey_Ecological_Footprint_Report_Turkish.pdf
Wynes S. & Nicholas K.A. (2017). The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions. Environ Res Lett. 2017; 12: 074024