ABOUT THE PROJECT

Broader picture

This project was implemented at the Department of Geography of the University of Zurich within the scope of the module "GEO 878 Geovisualisation". By and large the aim of this project was to work on a research question on one or more of the 17 "UN Sustainable Development Goals" and visualize the topic in this website.

The idea of the 17 "UN Sustainable Development Goals" is to ensure a sustainable progress on an ecological, social and economical basis. Those goals were elaborated and formulated in recent history by different countries and the United Nations and build an important part in the sustainable development of the Earth (United Nations, 2020). This project and website tries to show issues relating to global energy consumption/production and economic prosperity and develop visualizations which should give an impression of how well a country is doing regarding environmental sustainability and economic prosperity. Further the project should allow us to interpret the relation between economic prosperity and sustainable energy production/consumption as well as make "hidden facts" visible and take them into account, like exports of fossil fuels.

Therefore in this specific project mainly the following four Sustainable Development Goals are adressed (United Nations, 2020):

In the next section there is some more theoretical explanation about the topic regarding global energy consumption/production and economic prosperity. The following part is structured that in the tab "PROJECT" there are interactive maps to explore and the visual part belonging to the theory. In the tab "DATA" there is further explanation and an overview on which data was used. In the tab "TEAM" there is a short overview of the group which was working on this topic and in the least tab "CONTACT" there is an opportunity to get in contact with the team.

Background information

Both responsible, sustainable energy production/consumption and economic prosperity are very desirable or even necessary goals for a country respectively for the world as one. In addition to that these topics are strongly related to each other and often there has to be somehow of a tradeoff. This trade-off and how different countries perform regarding share of renewable energy consumption, (fossil) energy import/export and economic prosperity (GDP) can be explored in this project and forms our research question.

The fact that energy production/consumption and economic prosperity are strongly connected to each other can be partially explained by the fact, that the economic growth of a country or even a region can be highly dependent on energy (Chow et al., 2003). As global climate change is one of the key challenges to solve in the near future and being part of the 17 "UN Sustainable Development Goals" it is important to shift towards renewable energy sources and gradually shrink the production and consumption of fossil energy (Allison et al., 2014).