Team Members: Almaha Almalki, Lisa Woo, Jingxian Zhang, and Siyang(Autumn) Jing
We set up the scenario in a Mayor’s Summit, World Cities Summit or G20. The mayors of metropolitan areas all over the world will discuss the future solutions for the environmental problems, which including the air pollution as one of the most important topic. As the air pollution
Phenomena of Beijing draw the wide attention, the mayor of Beijing will show other policy makers how the policy will help control the air pollution problem.
Based on the Beijing pollution data from 2008 to 2016, we found the quality of the air had huge relationship with the holding of the big events such as Beijing Olympic Games, National Day March, APEC, etc. Behind the blue sky, there is strong policies to affect the air quality.
So we choose the year of 2014 and 2016 to see how different combination of policies could affect air pollution. The policies are categorized to long term policies and short term policies. Long term policies are renovation of heating systems, vehicle traffic restriction based on plate number, license-registration lottery, vehicle traffic restriction based on exhaust etc. Short term policies are vehicle traffic restriction based on plate number, close some factories in Beijing and its neighbor provinces temporarily , stop using X% of buses, and shut down construction sites temporarily etc.
The demo of the Policy Tower: In the tower, each cup represents an environmental policy. Different amount of blue colors, which represent strength of different policies, will be put in the cups. Yellow water (air pollution) will be poured from the top and go through all the cups. It will gradually turn green while drilling down — the more (and more strong the) policies, the more green the water will become. This is how policy tower works.
But we still need ask more question and do more work to complete this visualization. For example, we need more data for how much each policy contributes to the improvement of air pollution. Combining the cost of different policies to measure the feasibility of each of them, etc.
Link to Slides:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pzHCXqzz4h_wx1QeLg_dp0P0JZch3ghv_V3_xBeIY_Q/edit?usp=sharing