Human Development & The Amazon

Inspiration

The Amazon Rainforest spans millions of square miles, making it the world’s largest rainforest. Rainforest biomes are some of the most susceptible to human impacts from development, including deforestation and pollution from unsustainable forestry and logging, mining operations, agricultural land conversion, urbanization, and more. The Amazon Rainforest experiences every single one of these problems on a daily basis, and despite the efforts of the Brazilian government. Illegal operations, and of course, unsustainable practices even on unprotected land persist. Rainforests, especially those that are tropical like the Amazon provide a plethora of ecosystem services, some of these quantifiable, like the amount of carbon sequestration, and others unquantifiable like recreational value. It is difficult to stop development in these valued areas, but enforcement of legislation and simulation-based models that allow companies to realize how their efforts affect the environment can not only help prevent them from making harmful decisions, it can also prevent the need for them to invest in cleaning up their mistakes later. Education is at the center of this project.

What it does

It allows for

How we built it

Scratch, with help from Canva!

Challenges we ran into

Scratch is not always very user friendly, so we ran into tons of limitations. Nothing we couldn't deal with thought!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We went from using starter kits and running into every problem imaginable 2 years ago to having an actually educational, functional, final project. That is something we are very proud of!