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Thoughts on the Final Project

In this project, we made use of the distance layer which have not been taught in the GIS course previously, the project is overall a great experience. While some work on the map, other focuses on the written report to make better use of time.

However, we have come across some problem with finding our data for elderly home. There are only exact address of elderly home of Vancouver which existed online, we could not directly download a shape data file from the internet like we do for the other. When we tried to create a point with the address, we are required to have a “premium user” pass to do the action.

Difficulties we encountered:

1. Finding the right data is challenging! In the website in DataBC it is hard to find what you want because it is so specific. Furthermore, it does not always come in the right form. You sometimes need to change the data to excel and convert it.
2. Even when we found our data, there are lots of “excess”, “useless” data. We need to decide on what’s important and what isn’t.
3. Getting everyone on board with the same idea is hard. Everyone is busy an we cannot meet together at the same time which makes communicating hard.

Things I learnt:

1. Be patient and understand that others have work to do too so they might not be able to work at the same time as you.
2. Where to find data and what is important data.
3. Lots of data out there are private, also there are lots of interesting data out there such as ” carnival and festival location” in Vancouver throughout the year.

            There are currently around 7.5 billion people on earth and the number is only rising, it is estimated that the number would rise to 11.2 billion by year 2100. The debate as to whether the earth is able to support all those people lingers on and remain unknown but it is certain that if we North Americans continue the way we live today; we are certainly not able to support more people without sacrificing comfort at home to some level. Studies have shown that “Global aquifers are being pumped 3.5 times faster than rainfall can naturally recharge them” (Gleeson, Bierkens, Van Beek) .We need to find a more sustainable way to live because the earth’s resources is finite but human reproduce and material wants is infinite.

Take the energy consumption rate of the United States and China as an example. The States have around 314 million people and account for 4.5% of the world’s population but use around the same amount of energy as China; the only difference here is that China have 4 times the population of the US. In essence, energy consumption per American is 4 times of that of a Chinese citizen. (Wilson) This is only one example between a developed and developing countries. Effort have been made in the US’s part to cut down emission, but instead of consuming less energy. Acceding to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, “The United States has increased emissions 17%, despite a pledge to reduce emissions by 7%” since 2012. The earth cannot support life for much longer if people of the developed countries do not change their way of living.

 

Reference

Gleeson, T., Wada, Y., Bierkens, M. F., & Van Beek, L. P. (2012, August 8). Water balance of global aquifers revealed by groundwater … Retrieved November 22, 2016, from http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7410/full/nature11295.html

 

Wilson, R. (2014, July 9). Why China’s Energy Consumption Will Keep Rising. The Energy Collective. Retrieved November 20, 2016, from http://www.theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/420531/why-china-still-behind-west-energy

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