Over the years, extreme weather conditions and natural calamities like wildfires have shot up immensely, causing a rise in greenhouse gas emissions. To tackle the increasing threat of climate change, governments and large organizations are developing policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
One of the individuals engaged in battling rising emissions is Professor Kevin Gurney of Northern Arizona University’s School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems. He has spent the past several years developing a standardized system under the Vulcan Project that shows the amount of greenhouse gases emitted across the entire country visually and quantitatively.
The system covers everything from individual power plants to neighborhoods and roadways, detailing a map of greenhouse gas emissions across the entire U.S. landscape. This map is based on high space-time resolution and details on the economic sector, fuel, and combustion process to better help identify problem areas and push forward better decisions about where and how to cut emissions.
Backed and funded by NASA, his goal behind this map is to give decision makers and policymakers a strategic and cost-effective way of addressing the effect of greenhouse gases on the environment.
Gurney claims that through the characterization of CO2 emissions across every mile and from coast to coast of the US, the system offers every US city a consistent and comprehensive inventory of their emissions.
Is this map the missing link in our fight against climate change as a nation? Only time will tell.
