Inspiration
At most university campuses, there is a general lack of awareness of how our activities and actions might impact the climate. Even when there's some data reported, it's often hard to interpret the true impact, and reporting is usually not done in any cumulative way so that people can understand their overall impact. On top of this, reporting CO2 emissions alone is useful to raise awareness, however ultimately the goal is to reduce emissions, for which we want people to be more informed about the potential impact of their actions before they do them, so they can make a decision which factors in sustainability.
What it does
EmissionAware is a framework designed to address these issues, by providing a convenient, aggregated dashboard where users can see their cumulative environmental impact through activities which can be tracked easily by the university (such as university related travel, use of compute resources and eating food on campus).
By collecting information from various sources and integrating numerous sustainable initiatives, EmissionAware offers an interactive and user-friendly overview of a user's emissions and sustainability practices across a range of different areas. It is designed to not only provide an overview of emissions, but also suggest how a user can reduce their impact in future by suggesting more sustainable alternatives for when they next plan to travel/eat on campus/run a compute job etc.
By providing actionable feedback and proposing an easily extensible and flexible framework for addressing sustainability challenges, EmissionAware can help organizations become more sustainable and environmentally responsible, contributing to a brighter, more sustainable future for all.
How we built it
Demo website made with Quarto supported by synthetic data derived from real- data published by EPFL regarding carbon emissions.
Challenges we ran into
- Data collection, -granularity, -procurement
- Identifying a flexible framework
- Creating a structure to promote both awareness and improvement
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
- We were able to build a flexible framework that generalizes for different problems in sustainability
- We synthesized using real data and integrated the possibility to include other sustainability initiatives
We have created the app in such a way that it appeals to students and easily quantify difficult statistics
What I learned
How to use Quatro
How to build a unified framework for solving general sustainability problems
How to centralize, explain, and aggregate different statistics
How the data pipeline works for many data sources within EPFL
What's next for EmissionAware
- Integrate the platform with existing EPFL system's to automatically update each individual data regarding their carbon footprint (e.g. what meals they eat, how much time they spent running jobs in the cluster).
- Better data collection: Expand the platform to other carbon emission sources (e.g. commuting, etc).
- Group data by groups, associations and labs to give more meaningful insights
- Build better models to give alternatives to address each individual issue (e.g. estimating train and plane emissions more accurately).
