Project description
The general idea of the project was to create a research topic with the background of one of the 17 UN sustainable development goals. We chose the 12th sustainable development goal for our project. This goal promotes sustainable consumption and production patterns. One of the targets is to "support developing countries to strengthen their scientific and technological capacity to move towards more sustainable patterns of consumption and production". (Sustainable Development Goals 2016) However, consumption and production patterns are highly complex and include many aspects such as resource and energy use, infrastructure, job opportunities and life quality and they are not bound to more or less developed countries. Moreover, one part of sustainable production is to have low CO2 emissions, including CO2 discharge from agricultural production. In the end ensuring sustainable consumption and production helps in achieving overall development plans, reducing poverty and strengthening economic competitiveness. (UN Sustainable Development Goals 2016)
But if sustainable consumption and production has an impact on the development of a country, does it mean that the development stage correlates with the amount of agricultural CO2 emissions? Does the agricultural production in higher developed countries release less CO2 than in less developed regions?
With this project we are trying to answer that question by looking at the development stage of countries all over the world and comparing them with their agricultural CO2 emission level. To find a correlation between the development stage and the CO2 emissions the software environment for statistical computation and graphics R was used. To also be able to detect a temporal pattern visually we created a timeline, using CO2 data from five different years: 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2012, based on JavaScript. The data set of 2012 contains the most up-to-date data.
By clicking through the visualizations below you will be guided through the different analytical steps which were conducted in order to answer the research question.