Project title: How did the lockdown affect carbon dioxide levels in our local area?

Team: St. Pats climate detectives

St Patrick’s Secondary School   Castleisland   Ireland   4 Student’s age: 16-17 years old

How did the lockdown affect gas emissions in our local area?

• Our project is about how did lockdown effect emissions in our local areas. For the research we took readings from the people that filled them out for us then categorized them in order to determine the emissions of each car and bus. Then we start to count with all the students and teachers at the school how they go to school, we see that they go to school, we see that most people use: Skoda, Opel or Mercedes. On conclusion we discovered the use of diesel-powered different cars models and distributors, such as Volkswagen and Hyundai, these cars models are considered the most popular at the school community and local community.

 The main results that we were able to recognize were the effect of gas emissions on our local community and the different modes of transport that are mainly responsible for that increase in usage, it was mainly the use of diesel- powered cars.
 Another key result we were able to discover was that the local buses used to drop off and collect students from school are mainly designed by 2 main distributors, Volkswagen and Ford, who are considered the 2 most popular car brands, not just in our community but across Ireland as well.
 The next step we took into our research question was that we used was that we had to measure the amount of carbon dioxide with the aid of an air quality meter machine, which was able to scan pollutants, CO2 levels and airborne particulate matter. We also were able to measure our local area’s CO2 levels with the aid of an EO Browser, which can tell us about the humidity in the atmosphere dating back to 2020 & 2021.
 In our full conclusion, from all our collected research, we discovered that a large majority of people in our local community consider using diesel-powered vehicles rather than doing any physical mode of transport such as walking or cycling to school.

• We think that the actions that people can do to lessen the problem and cause less damage to the atmosphere in our local community are these:
• Switch to electricity-powered vehicles before the cutoff point of the use of diesel-powered vehicles and motivate other drivers to consider making a change to a more sustainable future.
• To help lessen the amount of traffic congestion on Irish roads, each Irish home should be provided with its own electrical charging port for electricity- powered car owners to be able to charge their cars overnight.
• Car distributors should cut down on the price of electrically powered cars as at this moment in time, electric cars are too expensive to afford, which is the only downside that is seen, so it would be wise to shorten the price.

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