ASU and Purdue University professors released a system Tuesday that visually maps an individual city’s carbon footprint.
The software system, The Hestia Project, displays carbon dioxide emissions in a city down to each particular street, factory and neighborhood at a specific time of day.
The project has mapped the carbon footprint of Indianapolis and is working to map Los Angeles and Phoenix.
Kevin Gurney, an associate professor in ASU’s School of Life Sciences and project creator, said the topic of environmental sustainability popularized in not only the scientific communities, but also the general public.
“People know that energy efficiency is good for everyone,” Gurney said. “It saves money, it lowers air pollution and it lowers greenhouse gases.”
Gurney plans for city officials to use the system to answer questions about how to save energy and become more efficient.
“(Using this system) will determine what are you going to cut, what are you going to conserve and what are you going to insulate,” Gurney said.
The Hestia Project aims to engage many ASU students and professors during the next few weeks.
“ASU has one of the flagship schools of sustainability for the U.S.,” Gurney said. “There is a strong interest in what we’ve done, and future ideas for the system (include) allowing users to actually interact with it.”
Gurney already intends to make some changes, including consumer interaction and mapping a broader landscape through Hestia in order for it to become more efficient and user-friendly.
Hestia relies on data input, but some information, like electricity and utility bills for individual households, are kept private.
“We live in a world in which every single living human being is a walking census device,” Gurney said. “They have a tremendous amount of information.”
By obtaining this data through volunteered information, Gurney said new statistics could be displayed on a very detailed and specific level, which would lead to increased accuracy.
Hestia is broken down into several different sectors, including industrial buildings, commercial buildings, residences, power plants and transportation, said Yang Song, a graduate student research assistant for the project.
He uses data submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency to determine the numbers of carbon dioxide emissions.
“Knowing where and when we emitted the most CO2 emission on roads will be very valuable information for city planners,” Song said. “It will tell them where they should focus, where they should spend the most money (and) what kind of cars aren’t good.”
Purdue University associate professor Bedrich Benes was responsible for the visualization of the data Gurney collected.
“The best way to understand the data is by visualizing it,” Benes said. “It’s really important that these questions could be understood by the general public, and we are trying to contribute to that.”
Hestia experts plan to expand to map all cities throughout the U.S. on a detailed scale and ultimately internationally, Gurney said.
“We are not the most efficient economy,” Gurney said. “We could cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent at almost no cost. When you save energy, you save money.”
Reach the reporter at cldas1@asu.edu
