Final Project – State of the World by United Nations Indicators

By Camilo SotoEric Duda

Anthony A. Zea

IntroductionI must admit that picking a topic for this final project was one of the most difficult tasks. We liked the freedom to pick at least 4 state of the world indicators from 16 already available and creating some of our own. The problem of having this freedom was that there was a lot of ways we could approach this project and there was no clear path. We knew that we wanted to analyze what the world was doing as far as energy production since there has been a lot of talk around the world about or current sources of energy and what they are doing to the world.

After countless hours of looking at the data that was available for energy production we decided on analyzing how much electricity countries are producing and from what source. Shortly after making this decision we realized that there was too many countries and not that much time.

After further analysis we realized that most of the top 10 countries producing electricity where also emitting the most carbon dioxide. This correlation gave us hope. We finally had a somewhat of clear path. We wanted to find why this countries where emitting so much carbon dioxide, what was contributing to this trend and what they were doing about it. We also decided to analyze any correlation between carbon dioxide emission and population density, life expectancy, and percent of area covered my forest in each of the top 10 countries producing electricity.

We believe it is important to identify the countries that are producing the most electricity and emitting the most carbon dioxide to determine if there is room for those countries to convert over to more efficient and clean sources of electricity.

Background informationIn order to be able to make an educated conclusion based on the data we chose to analyze we felt we needed a better background understanding electricity production, carbon dioxide emission and alternative renewable energy.

We already knew that a byproduct of producing electricity was carbon dioxide. We also knew that carbon dioxide contributed to global warming.

What we did not know was the exact values of carbon emission from different types of fuels. Depending on the renewable source of producing electricity carbon emission can be cut down by 2-5 times compared to fossil fuels.

We also found that on average producing electricity from renewable resources costs 2-3 times more than from fossil fuels and that to produce hydro and solar large amounts of land are needed.

Analysis MethodologyWe started our analysis wanting to know which and where are the top 10 countries producing the most electricity. To achieve what we wanted out of this project we used ESRI ArcGIS 10 software. The data we used was composed 4 indictors provided in ArcGIS format already and 5 more indicators that were not provided. The indicators that were provided were Percent of Area Covered by Forest, Population Density, Life Expectancy and Carbon Dioxide Emissions per Capita. The indicators that were not provided were retrieved from the United Nations data base. We named this indicators as Top Electricity Gross Production, Hydro Electricity Production, Wind Production, Solar Production, and Geothermal Production. A description of the indicators we created is provided later in this discussion. The data retrieved from the UN database was not in the format we desired so the data was downloaded as an excel sheet file and converted to a format that we could use in ArcGIS.

Once we had access to the data in ArcGIS we created a few maps we could analyze. The most useful maps we created are shown below.

As the tittle of the image above indicates, this map shows Gross Production Quantity GP. The index is defines from low production (green) to the top 10 countries producing electricity (blue). The table above has the names and the quantities per million kilowatt hour of electricity produced in 2010 of the top 10 countries.

The image below shows carbon dioxide emissions (metric tons Carbon dioxide per capita) of the globe. The index is defines form pink to orange. Pink being the countries emitting the least carbon dioxide and orange being the top 13 countries emitting the most carbon dioxide. A table showing the top 13 countries emitting the most carbon dioxide is also below.

Once we had the maps and the tables we observed that most of the countries that produced the most electricity in 2010 also emitted the most carbon dioxide that same year. We used that observation to further investigate our indicators.

We wanted to see which parts of the world were producing electricity form renewable sources so we produced the following layers in ArcGIS.

The image above is of the global location of the top 10 countries producing thermal electricity. The index goes from yellow to darker red. Red being the countries producing the most thermal electricity.

The image above illustrates the global index of hydro electricity production. The index goes from lighter blue to darker blue. The darker blue being the countries producing the most hydroelectricity.

The image above is of solar electricity production global index. The index goes from low production, light green, to high production dark green.

The image above is of wind electricity production global index. The index goes from low production, light green/gray, to high production dark green/gray.

The new layer, displayed above, allowed us to identify the areas of the world that were producing the most renewable electricity.

Some of the observations we made were that geothermal is not a very popular source of electricity around the globe. Only the United States produced significant amount of geothermal electricity in 2010. Hydroelectricity is being produced at high levels around the world except for countries that have a dry geographical landscape like North Africa and the Middle East. We initially though that countries with long and cold winters would have a low hydroelectricity production but we were proven wrong because Canada produced the 3 most hydroelectricity in 2010. Russia did prove us right since they don’t even appear in the top 3 list of countries producing hydroelectricity. Something that was very surprising was that European countries made up most of the list of top 10 countries producing solar electricity. It is surprising because they have very high population density and not that much room for solar panels. They must be very efficient with their space and use of roofs to place solar panels. As far as wind electricity production is concerned, the US is really the only country that produced any significant amount.

The table below also helped us analyze the data we had.

The flow chart below summarizes the path we took to create maps and tables used in the portion of the analysis.

Results and Discussion Points

The discussion points we came up with to discuss the data, as mentioned in the introduction, were as follows. What type of fuel do they use to produce their electricity? How much carbon dioxide do this countries produce? Do this countries poses a high percentage of land covered by forest to counteract their CO2 emissions? Is there any relation between CO2 emission and life expectancy?

Some of the results that we were able to produce were, most of Brazil’s and Canada’s gross production of electricity comes from Hydro and Wind. Most countries in the top 10 produce less than 20% of their electricity from Geothermal/Hydro/Solar/Wind (Renewables). Producing electricity from geothermal sources are not very popular in the top 10 except for the United States. Hydro electricity production is the most popular renewable fuel being used by the Top 10 countries. Germany and China produce a lot more solar electricity than the other top 10 countries. United States produces a lot more wind electricity than the other top 10 countries.The average population density for the top 10 countries is 215 people per square mile compared to the world’s 116 people per square mile (high demand for electricity per square mile).

Some other conclusions we could gather from the data are, average life expectancy from the top 10 countries producing electricity is 77.03 years compared to the world’s 71.0 years. Brazil, China, India, and Russia are all below the life expectancy average and on the higher end of the CO2 emission spectrum. The average total land covered by forest (%) of the top 10 countries is 41.4. Brazil, Japan and the Republic of Korea contribute the most trees to the carbon cycle. The country that contributes the most CO2 towards global warming is China.

As you can see from our results the data we had was not enough to answer all the questions we had. Given more time and resources we would have liked to continue with this topic. Maybe go in the direction of producing case studies for the countries mentioned in this paper. The case studies could include political, environmental and social factors affecting each country’s policy on renewable forms of producing electricity.

What we do feel comfortable in concluding with the available data is that there is room for improvement. Countries need to focus more time and money in converting over to renewable resources as their main source for electricity.