The Vulcan Project
The Vulcan Project is inspiring climate science with important lessons for business.
This project has mapped carbon dioxide emissions in the United States in 2002 at the level of individual factories, power plants and roads. As well as making the research data available online the project has developed some amazing visualizations such as those shown in the following video.
The same team is now building on these results with the Hestia Project, which aims to provide “detailed space-time information on fossil/industrial CO2 emissions via an intuitive, interactive, photorealistic, three-dimensional visualization of the Earth.”
This work is inspiring and clearly demonstrates the value in having detailed and verified data and having the ability to visualize the data to aid in education, planning and decision making.
At Greensense we think data capture and data visualization should be part of all businesses climate change strategy. We think having the capability to see and understand your business’s carbon inventory — at a sufficient level of detail — is the key to enabling meaningful actions to be taken and new strategies to be developed. This detail should extend across your supply chain and down into individual business areas and business activities.
Many businesses are already developing carbon inventories but are doing so only to meet regulatory requirements, such as those under the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting System in Australia.
While initiatives to develop corporate carbon inventories are important, without the capability to capture data at the right level of detail and visualize that data these inventories won’t be the strategic tools they could be.
Tags: carbon inventory, Climate Change, climate science, data capture, data visualization, Greenhouse Gas Abatement
