The Hunger Game

Overview

Objective: Most of the people think that increasing agriculture production can alleviate the hunger problem overworld, while it results in the increase of CO2 emission and contributes to global warming. This project explores global CO2 emission data, food production data and undernourishment population data to explore whether this paradox true exists.

Product: Shiny App

Input: Year slider - Flexible select year range of interest
Output:
- Dashboard:
- Time Series Data: Line plots of variables changing over time
- Emission Data: Point plots of the relationship between Emissions and Global CO2
- Undernourishment Data: Point plots of undernourishment and Global CO2
Data
Info
Source Code

Significance:

With this project, we found that increasing food production does not seem to decrease the proportion of the unnourished population in the world. However, increased food production in recent years seems to correlate and contribute to the increase in atmospheric GHG. This suggests that other factors are at play. Some possible reason may be due to the unbalanced distribution of food between developed and undeveloped countries and subsequently increased food waste in developed countries. This speculation needs to be further backed up by research. In the future, the insight gained from this project can be further expanded with more exploration in international food trade and comparison of waste generation between the first-world and third-world countries.

This is important to gender equality as well because the women are often at most pressure in feeding the family. From this project, we see that the increase in food production does not help empower women in third-world countries. Thus, investigating this problem may help alleviate gender inequalities in addition to slowing global warming.

Contributor

Team Member Name	Github Handle
Jielin Yu	@jielinyu
Jingyun Chen	@jchen9314
Sylvia Lee	@LeeYinYing
Zixin Zhang	@zxzzhangg

Data

The below is the description of our data table.

Variable Name	Description	Unit
Year	Range from 1961 to 2016	year
Livestock Emission	Total amount of GHG emissions from livestock.	Gigagram
Livestock Value	Total meat production from both commercial and farm slaughter.	Head
Agriculture Emission	Total amount of GHG emissions from agriculture.	Gigagram
Agriculture Value	Various food and agriculture commodities’, gross production values	$US
Undernourishment	Rate of undernourishment	N/A