Just wonder 10 years from now, your son/grandson won’t be able to see the world in the same way that you do right now. The park where you used to have a picnic would, most probably, be a steel jungle with just residential areas and buildings around. The forest that is wild and lush green would then meet the boundaries of the cities and rest is all about steels and bricks.

If you are a little skeptical about it, this analysis would at least give a hint about what direction we have moved in the last 15 years. Other hints include the droughts, floods, landslides and other calamities which is nature’s response to the pain we are causing to the mother earth.

Let’s not be so pessimistic. There’s a piece of good news as well which we will see at the end of this blog. But action needs to be taken now. Let’s proceed by making an analysis of the loss of greenery/forest in the last 15 years span at the cost of urban development.

Technology Stack

• Python3
• PIL (pillow)

Technical Details

We are going to make use of satellite images that we extracted from zoom.earth as a data source to make analysis on. zoom. earth provides with historical satellite images within a timeframe.

The analysis first preprocesses the data by filtering out some conditional green pixels values from the image. The condition might vary from image to image based on the quality of the image depending on when was image captured, for example, during sunlight, during monsoon.

We can now calculate the intensity of green color in the image by using the formulae:

Green Intensity = Σ (255 - green_value(RGB value of pixel)))/(Area of the image)

The green intensity is here used to calculate the average intensity of greenery in the preprocessed image. It is calculated by summation of (255 - green_value(RGB value of pixel)). This summation is then divided by area of the image.

1. Chennai

Recently, Chennai, which is one of the metropolitan cities in India. Chennai is currently suffering from a shortage of drinking water which is a major concern for a city of nearly 10.6 million people. The calculations regarding how much greenery have we lost in the time period depicted above is:

Green Intensity in 2004=93.37131108162518

Green Intensity in 2017 = 62.49703361395803

2. Amsterdam

Amsterdam is one of the most eco-friendly countries in the world. This Netherlands capital which lies on the country’s western side has a population of around 1 million people. The citizens of the city and the higher authorities prefer greener options like organic farming, cycles over motor vehicles. But there has been a loss of lush greenery as we see from the image below due to rapid development in the city. The filtered image is shown below:

The calculations regarding how much greenery have we lost in the time period depicted above is:

Green Intensity in 2004 = 78.01939398792094

Green Intensity in 2016 = 54.28054462542704

Future options for sustainability

The best part is that what has been done can be undone unless it’s too late. As a responsible inhabitant of the mother earth, we should try to preserve the planet. We should always prefer greener options which leave minimal impact on the planet. We should demote deforestation and try to avoid using products that promote it.

Well anyways!! Did you ever give a thought for Forest city?

References and courtesy:

• Wikipedia ❤
• zoom.earth ❤
• futurism.com ❤
• worldpopulationreview.com ❤
• indiapopulation2019.com ❤

Audience:

You can access the code at https://github.com/achint008/greener-planet. This project is under development and there is a huge scope of improvement. Please feel free to give suggestions and contribute to the project. Finally, clap to see me motivated.

HelloWorld of Blogs!

I am a Computer Science undergraduate from The LNM Institute Of Information Technology. I have a very inquisitive mindset with good grasp towards computer technologies. I am a good team player who involves quickly with other teammates. I am very cheerful, enthusiastic and full of innovative ideas. I see myself as one of the fortunate ones to be born in this generation where mankind is gearing up using technology towards a better life and that’s what builds up the foundation for my passion. My next 5 years plan include:

• Get a good pay scale job to save some money for my further studies
• Get admitted into a university with excellent research opportunities
• Work on at least one problem that could have a large impact in the world
• World Tour
• Win a Trilathon.
• Buy an AMG car with my own $$$.

I plan to start the habit of posting some blogs now and then so as to share some of my wonderful experiences of mine to the world. The last blog I wrote was left unsaved and when I was posting the blog, due to some network issues, the blog content got erased and my one day’s effort got wasted. So this one’s short and simple, just to give this habit a sweet start. Stay tuned for more!