The longer human activities are changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the more visible, wider, and longer lasting the scope of environmental impacts may be. Your challenge is to tell a visual story about the impacts of the pandemic using Earth observation data and other complementary information.
With the ongoing pandemic crushing our morale, it has been difficult to look at the positive side of things. However, a silver lining has certainly come in the fight against environmental degradation. While all humans were trapped inside their houses, the air, water and soil quality did improve. With human intervention out of the picture nature has had time to heal herself. Our project will demonstrate the positive after-effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic which includes an increase in the quality of air and water and reduction of greenhouse gases and pollution. However, with the revival of the economy a question does loom; “Will It Be Business As Usual?”
The challenge was to tell a story on the effects of COVID-19 on the Environment. We chose to show the positive effects of the pandemic on the environment which mainly focuses on the increase of air quality levels with a wide decline in pollution.
According to this article by HSPH Harvard, Climate Change might certainly be one of many consequential reasons for virus outbreaks. However in a complete irony, Covid did slow down the economy and improved the overall environmental condition. However with mass vaccination drives across the world and countries trying to reopen and revive their economy, an impending threat still persists; was this rise in air quality a temporary state of affairs? Will the global leaders simply overlook environmental standards to bring back economy?
We have prepared a video that would better explain our project. To make it interesting we even added a teaser for our video. With the help of EO Dashboard data and the greatest efforts from our team members, we tried our best to represent it as an appealing and brief note.
Our objective is to use the data given to use and raise public awareness. The rise in air quality is a second chance; another opportunity given to us by mother nature herself. Let us preserve and sustain our environment, lets not go back to 'pre-covid' levels of pollution. Lets show the Earth that we care and we can change.
We have developed this project based on the data collected from the earth observation dashboard and integrating it with various data which are collected from the web. We were able to correlate and distinguish the data considering pre and post lockdown effects in various countries globally, mainly those included in south and central Asia regions.
The EO Dashboard was certainly a motivation for our project. Looking at the air quality we realized while the CO2 and NO2 levels were at its lowest around mid to late 2020, they gradually started rising with countries beginning to open and industries starting to function again.
With this bias, we looked at some other sources that validate our claim. Most of the data we used was from NASA, ESA, and JAXA
NASA and ESA preferably. A little outer research was done from promising sites which help us prove our point better by providing us with examples and headlines of top news publishing websites.
Air Quality - TROPOMI: NO2 indicator allows us to draw an area of interest on the map and show statistical NO2 for the user-drawn area of interest over time. One of the ways to extend our project indicator is by using geoDB or other EDC services to provide more insights to users regarding the quality of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
#AirQuality #AirQualityIndex #PositveOutcomesofCOVID-19 #Pollution #Enviornment #StorytellingintheCOVIDera #GoodNews #COVID-19 #greenhousegases #co2 #southasiaandpacific
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.